Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 26

HOMER.[X]

Troy fell before the Greeks; and in its turn the war of Troy is now falling before the critics. That ten years' death-struggle, in which the immortals did not disdain to mingle--those ma.s.sive warriors, with their grandeur and their chivalry, have, 'like an unsubstantial pageant, faded' before the wand of these modern enchanters; and the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the other early legends, are discovered to be no more than the transparent myths of an old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescoes with which the imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with the seasons, and the labours of the sun through his twelve signs.

Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to have fared no better. His works, indeed, were indestructible, yet if they could not be destroyed, they might be disorganised; and with their instinctive hatred of facts, the critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet.

The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic imagination; and--instead of a single inspired Homer for their author, we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had personified.

But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was once said, were stubborn things; but in our days we have changed all that; a fact, under the knife of a critic, splits in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with incredible readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an unscrupulous advocate, and is turned about and twisted this way and that way, till in its distraction it contradicts itself, and bears witness against itself; and to escape from torture, at last flies utterly away, itself half doubting its own existence.

But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Homer; like his own immortals, he may be wounded, but he cannot have the life carved out of him by the prosaic strokes of common men. His poems have but to be disintegrated to unite again, so strong are they in the individuality of their genius. The singleness of their structure--the unity of design--the distinctness of drawing in the characters--the inimitable peculiarities of manner in each of them, seem to place beyond serious question, after the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both Iliad and Odyssey, whether or not the work of the same mind, are at least each of them singly the work of one.

Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.

Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never a.s.sure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere.

The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable.

With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the old G.o.ds of the h.e.l.lenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later in human forms, they descended from Olympus to a.s.sume them. Diomed was the OEtolian sun-G.o.d; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before he became the hero of the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of Atreus, and the b.l.o.o.d.y bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told with appearance of certainty,[Y] are humanised stories of the physical struggle of the opposing principles of life and death, light and darkness, night and day, winter and summer.

And let them be so; we need not be sorry to believe that there is no substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung historically we know nothing literal at all--not any names of any kings, of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all gone--dead--pa.s.sed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which historians fill their pages there is no trace; it is a blank, vacant as the annals of the Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said, there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, perhaps, than exist for any period of the ancient world, richer than even for the brilliant days of Pericles, or of the Caesars, to construct a history of another kind--a history, a picture not of the times of which he sang, but of the men among whom he lived. How they acted; how they thought, talked, and felt; what they made of this earth, and of their place in it; their private life and their public life; men and women; masters and servants; rich and poor--we have it all delineated in the marvellous verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect the greatest which the earth has ever seen. In extent, the information is little enough; but in the same sense as it has been said that an hour at an Athenian supper-party would teach us more Grecian life and character than all Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopaedia of disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous property of verse--one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse any superst.i.tion on the origin of language--that the metrical and rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all other outward things in which human hearts take interest--to produce them, or to reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce the same emotions which they would themselves produce when really existing.

The thing itself is made present before us by an exercise of creative power as genuine as that of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the same power manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in outward phenomena. Whatever be the cause, the fact is so. Poetry has this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history the poet gives us--not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is the heart of his age, and his verse expresses his age; and what matter is it by what name he describes his places or his persons? What matter is it what his own name was, while we have himself, and while we have the originals, from which he drew? The work and the life are all for which we need care, are all which can really interest us; the names are nothing. Though Phoeacia was a dream-land, or a symbol of the Elysian fields, yet Homer drew his material, his island, his palaces, his harbour, his gardens of perennial beauty, from those fair cities which lay along the sh.o.r.es of his own Ionia; and like his blind Demodocus, Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which now delight us so, in the halls of many a princely Alcinous.

The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic, unpoetic kind--the Cleons, the Seja.n.u.ses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the n.o.ble element died out into selfishness and vulgarity. But great men--and all MEN properly so called (whatever is genuine and natural in them)--lie beyond prose, and can only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories, because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through which we have looked at them. We compare the man as the historian represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with which the stunted imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater than one of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not equal. It describes a figure which it calls Caesar; but it is not Caesar, it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which they are able to represent is not worth representing. There is no person so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze with pleasure into a looking-gla.s.s; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel.

But the value of all such representations is ephemeral. It is with the poet's art as with the sculptor's--sandstone will not carve like marble, its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. The actions of men, if they are true, n.o.ble, and genuine, are strong enough to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.

What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Homer's verse, we intend to spend these pages in examining. It is, of course, properly to be sought for in the poems themselves. But we shall here be concerned mainly with features which in the original are rather secondary than prominent, and which have to be collected out of fragments, here a line, and there a line, out of little hints, let fall by Homer as it were by accident. Things too familiar to his own hearers to require dwelling on, to us, whose object is to make out just those very things which were familiar, are of special and singular value. It is not an enquiry which will much profit us, if we come to it with any grand notions of the 'progress of the species,' for in many ways it will discourage the belief in progress.

We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood and infancy of the race, as if no beards had grown on any face before the modern Reformation; and even people who know what old Athens was under Pericles, look commonly on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of its cradle. It would have fared so with all early history except for the Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to keep us in our modest senses, and we can see something grand about the patriarchs; but this is owing to exceptional causes, which do not apply to other literature; and in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard his age, and the contemporary periods in the other people of the earth, as a kind of childhood little better than barbarism. We look upon it, at all events, as too far removed in every essential of spirit or of form from our own, to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. More or less, we have, every one of us, felt something of this kind. Homer's men are, at first sight, unlike any men that we have ever seen; and it is not without a shock of surprise that, for the first time, we fall, in reading him, across some little trait of humanity which in form as well as spirit is really identical with our own experience. Then, for the moment, all is changed with us--gleams of light flash out, in which the drapery becomes transparent, and we see the human form behind it, and that entire old world in the warm glow of flesh and blood. Such is the effect of those few child scenes of his, which throw us back into our old familiar childhood. With all these years between us, there is no difference between their children and ours, and child would meet child without sense of strangeness in common games and common pleasures.

The little Ulysses climbing on the knees of his father's guest, coaxing for a taste of the red wine, and spilling it as he starts at the unusual taste; or that other most beautiful picture of him running at Laertes's side in the garden at Ithaca, the father teaching the boy the names of the fruit-trees, and making presents to him of this tree and of that tree for his very own, to help him to remember what they were called; the part.i.tion wall of three thousand years melts away as we look back at scenes like these; that broad, world-experienced man was once, then, such a little creature as we remember ourselves, and Laertes a calm, kind father of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the children loved to sport upon the sh.o.r.e, and watch the inrolling waves;--then, as now, the boy-architect would pile the moist sand into mimic town or castle, and when the work was finished, sweep it away again in wanton humour with foot and hand;--then, as now, the little tired maiden would cling to her mother's skirt, and, trotting painfully along beside her, look up wistfully and plead with moist eyes to be carried in her arms. Nay, and among the grown ones, where time has not changed the occupation, and the forms of culture have little room to vary, we meet again with very familiar faces. There is Melantho, the not over-modest t.i.ttering waiting-maid--saucy to her mistress and the old housekeeper, and always running after the handsome young princes. Unhappy Melantho, true child of universal nature! grievous work we should make with most households, if all who resemble thee were treated to as rough a destiny. And there are other old friends whom it is pleasant enough to recognise at so long a distance. 'Certain smooth-haired, sleek-faced fellows--insolent where their lords would permit them; inquisitive and pert, living but to eat and drink, and pilfering the good things, to convey them stealthily to their friends outside the castle wall.' The thing that hath been, that shall be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into its long enduring form. 'Such are they,' he adds, in his good-natured irony, 'as the valet race ever love to be.'

With such evidence of ident.i.ty among us all, it is worth while to look closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Homer something beyond fine poetry, or exciting adventures, or battle-scenes, or material for scholarship; for awhile to set all that aside, and look in him for the story of real living men--set to pilgrimise in the old way on the same old earth--men such as we are, children of one family, with the same work to do, to live the best life they could, and to save their souls--with the same trials, the same pa.s.sions, the same difficulties, if with weaker means of meeting them.

And first for their religion.

Let those who like it, lend their labour to the unravelling the secrets of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theologies are not religion; they are but its historic dress and outward or formal expression, which, like a language, may be intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the sign, but no more than confused sound to us who live in another atmosphere, and have no means of transferring ourselves into the sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these forms of a day or of an age that we should look for the real belief--the real feelings of the heart; but in the natural expressions which burst out spontaneously--expressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of man to G.o.d, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. Perhaps we misuse the word in speaking of religion; we ought rather to speak of piety: piety is always simple; the emotion is too vast, too overpowering, whenever it is genuine, to be nice or fantastic in its form; and leaving philosophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in myth and legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clearness.

We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand them over to the fancy or the imagination for elaborate decoration. We may shroud over supposed mysteries under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation to the capacities of our pupils; but before the vast facts of G.o.d and Providence, the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. They are no discoveries of our own with which we can meddle, but revelations of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike, wise and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit no other acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives, and the plainest confession of our lips.

Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not anywhere find more natural or unaffected than in Homer--most definite, yet never elaborate--as far as may be from any complimenting of Providence, yet expressing the most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often remember them when we set about religion as a business; but when the occasions of life stir the feelings in us on which religion itself reposes, if we were as familiar with the Iliad as with the Psalms, the words of the old Ionian singer would leap as naturally to our lips as those of the Israelite king.

Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor the G.o.ds always the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it is true, they appear as a larger order of subject beings--beings like men, and subject to a higher control--in a position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and liable like them to pa.s.sion and to error. But at times, the father of G.o.ds and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler--the living Providence of the world--and the lesser G.o.ds are the immortal administrators of his Divine will throughout the lower creation. For ever at the head of the universe there is an awful spiritual power; when Zeus appears with a distinct and positive personality, he is himself subordinate to an authority which elsewhere is one with himself. Wherever either he or the other G.o.ds are made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpedon, and his private love conflicts with the law of the eternal order, though he has power to set aside the law, he dares not break it; but in the midst of his immortality, and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is a power supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of which Iris reminds the latter, when she is sent to rebuke him for his disobedience to his brother. It is a law, she says, that the younger shall obey the elder, and the Erinnys will revenge its breach even on a G.o.d.

But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among mankind, the Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly as we in this day can conceive it. The supreme power is the same immortal lover of justice and the same hater of iniquity; and justice means what we mean by justice, and iniquity what we mean by iniquity. There is no diffidence, no scepticism on this matter; the moral law is as sure as day and night, summer and winter. Thus in the sixteenth Iliad--

'When in the market-place men deal unjustly, and the rulers decree crooked judgment, not regarding the fear of G.o.d,' G.o.d sends the storm, and the earthquake, and the tempest, as the executors of his vengeance.

Again, Ulysses says--

'G.o.d looks upon the children of men, and punishes the wrong-doer.'

And Eumaeus--

'The G.o.ds love not violence and wrong; but the man whose ways are righteous, him they honour.'

Even when as mere Olympians they put off their celestial nature, and mix in earthly strife, and are thus laid open to earthly suffering, a mystery still hangs about them; Diomed, even while he crosses the path of Ares, feels all the while 'that they are short-lived who contend with the Immortals.' Ajax boasts that he will save himself in spite of heaven, and immediately the wave dashes him upon the rocks. One light word escaped Ulysses in the excitement of his escape from the Cyclops, which nine years of suffering hardly expiated.

The same spirit which teaches Christians that those who have no earthly friend have specially a friend above to care for and to avenge them, taught the Ionians a proverb which appears again and again in Homer, that the stranger and the poor man are the patrimony of G.o.d; and it taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less abundant; but at any rate those antique Greeks did what they said. We say what they said, while in the same breath we say, too, that it is impossible to do it.

In every way, the dependence of man on a special heavenly Providence was a matter of sure and certain conviction with them. Telemachus appeals to the belief in the Council at Ithaca. He questions it at Pylos, and is at once rebuked by Athene. Both in Iliad and Odyssey to live justly is the steady service which the G.o.ds require, and their favour as surely follows when that service is paid, as a Nemesis sooner or later follows surely, too, on the evil-doers.

But without multiplying evidence, as we easily might, from every part of both Iliad and Odyssey, the sceptical and the believing forms of thought and feeling on this very subject are made points of dramatic contrast, to show off the opposition of two separate characters; and this is clear proof that such thoughts and feelings must have been familiar to Homer's hearers: if it were not so, his characters would have been without interest to his age--they would have been individual, and not universal; and no expenditure of intellect, or pa.s.sion, would have made men care to listen to him. The two persons who throughout the Iliad stand out in relief in contrast to each other are, of course, Hector and Achilles; and faith in G.o.d (as distinct from a mere recognition of him) is as directly the characteristic of Hector as in Achilles it is entirely absent. Both characters are heroic, but the heroism in them springs from opposite sources. Both are heroic, because both are strong; but the strength of one is in himself, and the strength of the other is in his faith. Hector is a patriot; Achilles does not know what patriotism means;--Hector is full of tenderness and human affection; Achilles is self-enveloped. Even his love for Patroclus is not pure, for Patroclus is as the moon to the sun of Achilles, and Achilles sees his own glory reflected on his friend. They have both a forecast of their fate; but Hector, in his great brave way, scoffs at omens; he knows that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, and defies augury. To do his duty is the only omen for which Hector cares; and if death must be, he can welcome it like a gallant man, if it find him fighting for his country. Achilles is moody, speculative, and subjective; he is too proud to attempt an ineffectual resistance to what he knows to be inevitable, but he alternately murmurs at it and scorns it. Till his pa.s.sion is stirred by his friend's death, he seems equally to disdain the greatness of life and the littleness of it; the glories of a hero are not worth dying for; and like Solomon, and almost in Solomon's words, he complains that there is one event to all--

[Greek: En de ie time e men kakos ee kai esthlos.]

To gratify his own spleen, he will accept an inglorious age in Thessaly, in exchange for a hero's immortality; as again in the end it is but to gratify his own wounded pride that he goes out to brave a fate which he scorns while he knows that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the hero of the stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, iron law, meets force with force, and holds up against it an unbroken, unbending will. Human nature is at its best but a miserable business to him; death and sorrow are its inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such things, but he will not pretend to regard them as anything but detestable; and he comforts the old, weeping king of Troy, whose age he was himself bringing down to the grave in sorrow, with philosophic meditations on the vanity of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing the elements of life out of the two urns of good and evil.

Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. Achilles is all self, Hector all self-forgetfulness; Achilles all pride, Hector all modesty. The confidence of Achilles is in himself and in his own arm; Hector knows (and the strongest expressions of the kind in all the Iliad are placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no strength except from above. 'G.o.d's will,' he says, 'is over all; he makes the strong man to fear, and gives the victory to the weak, if it shall please him.' And at last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, not with a defiance, but calmly saying, 'I know that thou art mighty, and that my strength is far less than thine; but these things lie in the will of the G.o.ds, and I, though weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from thee, if the Immortals choose to have it so.'

So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, the feeling of Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, is distinct. Both the great poems bearing his name speak in the same language. But beyond the general fact, many questions rise in the application of the creed, and on one of these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem to mark the Odyssey as of a later age) there is a very singular discrepancy. In the Iliad, the life of man on this side the grave is enough for the completion of his destiny--for his reward, if he lives n.o.bly; for his punishment, if he be base or wicked. Without repinings or scepticisms at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is contented with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of life as they are; it never seems to occur to him as seriously possible that a bad man could succeed or a good one fail; and as the ways of Providence, therefore, require no vindicating, neither his imagination nor his curiosity tempts him into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is the long home to which men go when dismissed out of their bodies; but it is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see nothing, and concerning which no conjectures are ventured. Achilles, in his pa.s.sion over Patroclus, cries out, that although the dead forget the dead in the halls of the departed, yet that he will remember his friend; and through the Iliad there is nothing clearer than these vague words to show with what hopes or fears the poet looked forward to death. So far, therefore, his faith may seem imperfect; yet, perhaps, not the less n.o.ble because imperfect; religious men in general are too well contented with the promise of a future life, as of a scene where the seeming shortcomings of the Divine administration will be carried out with larger equity. But whether imperfect or not, or whatever be the account of the omission, the theory of Hades in the Odyssey is developed into far greater distinctness; the future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne--and the darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro, mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on its memory.

And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the Divine rule, we have a glimpse--it is but one, but it is like a ray of sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave--'of the far-off Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with the golden hair, where life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any rain or storm, and the never-dying zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the ocean.'

However vague the filling up of such a picture, the outline is correct to the best which has been revealed even in Christianity, and it speaks n.o.bly for the people among whom, even in germ, such ideas could root themselves. But think what we will of their notions of the future, the old Greek faith, considered as a practical and not a theological system, is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral; if it does not profess to deal with the mysteries of evil in the heart, it is prompt and stern with them in their darker outward manifestations, and, as far as it goes, as a guide in the common daily business of life, it scarcely leaves anything unsaid.

How far it went we shall see in the details of the life itself, the most important of which in the eyes of a modern will be the social organisation; and when he looks for organisation, he will be at once at a loss, for he will find the fact of government yet without defined form;--he will find law, but without a public sword to enforce it; and a 'social machine' moving without friction under the easy control of opinion. There are no wars of cla.s.ses, no politics, no opposition of interests, a sacred feeling of the will of the G.o.ds keeping every one in his proper subordination. It was a sacred duty that the younger should obey the elder, that the servant should obey his master, that property should be respected; in war, that the leader should be obeyed without questioning; in peace, that public questions should be brought before the a.s.sembly of the people, and settled quietly as the Council determined. In this a.s.sembly the prince presided, and beyond this presidency his authority at home does not seem to have extended. Of course there was no millennium in Ionia, and men's pa.s.sions were pretty much what they are now. Without any organised means of repressing crime when it did appear, the people were exposed to, and often suffered under, extreme forms of violence--violence such as that of the suitors at Ithaca, or of aegisthus at Argos. On the other hand, what a state of cultivation it implies, what peace and comfort in all cla.s.ses, when society could hold together for a day with no more complete defence.

And, moreover, there are disadvantages in elaborate police systems.

Self-reliance is one of the highest virtues in which this world is intended to discipline us; and to depend upon ourselves even for our own personal safety is a large element in moral training.

But not to dwell on this, and to pa.s.s to the way in which the men of those days employed themselves.

Our first boy's feeling with the Iliad is, that Homer is pre-eminently a poet of war; that battles were his own pa.s.sion, and tales of battles the delight of his listeners. His heroes appear like a great fighting aristocracy, such as the after Spartans were, Homer himself like another Tyrtaeus, and the poorer occupations of life too menial for their notice or for his. They seem to live for glory--the one glory worth caring for only to be won upon the battle-field, and their exploits the one worthy theme of the poet's song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other such, it is very different from the truth. If war had been a pa.s.sion with the Ionians, as it was with the Teutons and the Nors.e.m.e.n, the G.o.d of battles would have been supreme in the Pantheon; and Zeus would scarcely have called Ares the most hateful spirit in Olympus--most hateful, _because_ of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks forward to a chivalry of labour. He rather wishes than expects that a time may come when the campaign of industry against anarchic nature may gather into it those feelings of gallantry and n.o.bleness which have found their vent hitherto in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr.

Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.

How to elevate labour--how to make it beautiful--how to enlist the _spirit_ in it (for in no other way can it be made humanly profitable), that is the problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for us. He may look to the past as well as to the future; in the old Ionia he will find all for which he wishes. The wise Ulysses built his own house, and carved his own bed. Princes killed and cooked their own food. It was a holy work with them--their way of saying grace for it; for they offered the animal in his death to the G.o.ds, and they were not butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper of swine is called n.o.ble, and fights like a hero; and the young princess of Phoeacia--the loveliest and gracefullest of Homer's women--drove the clothes-cart and washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was labour free--for so it was among the early Romans; or honourable, so it was among the Israelites,--but it was beautiful--beautiful in the artist's sense, as perhaps elsewhere it has never been. In later Greece--in what we call the glorious period--toil had gathered about it its modern crust of supposed baseness--it was left to slaves; and wise men, in their philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of it as unworthy of the higher specimens of cultivated humanity.

But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit ill.u.s.trations for the most glorious achievements of his heroes; and in every page we find, in simile or metaphor some common scene of daily life worked out with elaborate beauty. What the popular poet chooses for his ill.u.s.trations are as good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and the images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows his hearers will be pleased to dwell upon. There is much to be said about this, and we shall return to it presently; in the meantime, we must not build on indirect evidence. The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together, a complete picture of Homer's microcosm; Homer surely never thought inglorious or ign.o.ble what the immortal art of Hephaistos condescended to imitate.

The first groups of figures point a contrast which is obviously intentional; and the significance becomes sadly earnest when we remember who it was that was to bear the shield. The moral is a very modern one, and the picture might be called by the modern name of Peace and War.

There are two cities, embodying in their condition the two ideas. In one, a happy wedding is going forward; the pomp of the hymeneal procession is pa.s.sing along the streets; the air is full of music, and the women are standing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the terrors of a siege; the hostile armies glitter under the walls, the women and children press into the defence, and crowd to the battlements. In the first city, a quarrel rises, and wrong is made right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the majesty of law and order. The heads of the families are sitting gravely in the market-place, the cause is heard, the compensation set, the claim awarded. Under the walls of the other city an ambush lies, like a wild beast on the watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pa.s.s on with their flocks to the waterside; the spoilers spring from their hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, and confusion.

If there were other war-scenes on the shield, it might be doubted whether Homer intended so strong a contrast as he executed; but fighting for its own sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a series of exquisite Rubens-like pictures: harvest scenes and village festivals; the ploughing and the vintage, or the lion-hunt on the reedy margin of the river; and he describes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no other old world art or poetry gives us anything in the least resembling.

Even we ourselves, in our own pastorals, are struggling with but half success, after what Homer entirely possessed. What a majesty he has thrown into his harvest scene! The yellow corn falling, the boys following to gather up the large arms-full as they drop behind the reapers; in the distance a banquet preparing under the trees; in the centre, in the midst of his workmen, the king sitting in mellow silence, sceptre in hand, looking on with gladdened heart. Again we see the ploughmen, unlike what are to be seen in our corn-grounds, turning their teams at the end of the furrow, and attendants standing ready with the wine-cup, to hand to them as they pa.s.s. Homer had seen these things, or he would not have sung of them; and princes and n.o.bles might have shared such labour without shame, when kings took part in it, and G.o.ds designed it, and the divine Achilles bore its image among his insignia in the field.

a.n.a.logous to this, and as part of the same feeling, is that intense enjoyment of natural scenery, so keen in Homer, and of which the Athenian poets show not a trace; as, for instance, in that night landscape by the sea, finished off in a few lines only, but so exquisitely perfect! The broad moon, gleaming through the mist as it parts suddenly from off the sky; the crags and headlands, and soft wooded slopes, shining out in the silver light, and earth and sea transformed into fairy land.

We spoke of Homer's similes as ill.u.s.trative of the Ionic feelings about war. War, of course, was glorious to him--but war in a glorious cause.

Wars there were--wars in plenty, as there have been since, and as it is like there will be for some time to come; and a just war, of all human employments, is the one which most calls out whatever n.o.bleness there is in man. It was the thing itself, the actual fighting and killing, as apart from the heroism for which it makes opportunities, for which we said that he showed no taste. His manner shows that he felt like a cultivated man, and not like a savage. His spirit stirs in him as he goes out with his hero to the battle; but there is no drunken delight in blood; we never hear of warriors as in that grim Hall of the Nibelungen, quenching their thirst in the red stream; never anything of that fierce exultation in carnage with which the war poetry of so many nations, late and old, is crimsoned. Everything, on the contrary, is contrived so as to soften the merely horrible, and fix our interest only on what is grand or beautiful. We are never left to dwell long together on scenes of death, and when the battle is at its fiercest, our minds are called off by the rapid introduction (either by simile or some softer turn of human feeling) of other a.s.sociations, not contrived, as an inferior artist would contrive, to deepen our emotions, but to soften and relieve them. Two warriors meet, and exchange their high words of defiance; we hear the grinding of the spear-head, as it pierces shield and breast-plate, and the crash of the armour, as this or that hero falls.

But at once, instead of being left at his side to see him bleed, we are summoned away to the soft water meadow, the lazy river, the tall poplar, now waving its branches against the sky, now lying its length along in the gra.s.s beside the water, and the woodcutter with peaceful industry labouring and lopping at it.

In the thick of the universal melee, when the stones and arrows are raining on the combatants, and some furious hailstorm is the slightest ill.u.s.tration with which we should expect him to heighten the effect of the human tempest, so sure Homer is that he has painted the thing itself in its own intense reality, that his simile is the stillest phenomenon in all nature--a stillness of activity, infinitely expressive of the density of the shower of missiles, yet falling like oil on water on the ruffled picture of the battle; the snow descending in the _still_ air, covering first hills, then plains and fields and farmsteads; covering the rocks down to the very water's edge, and clogging the waves as they roll in. Again, in that fearful death-wrestle at the Grecian wall, when gates and battlements are sprinkled over with blood, and neither Greeks nor Trojans can force their way against the other, we have, first, as an image of the fight itself, two men in the field, with measuring rods, disputing over a land boundary; and for the equipoise of the two armies, the softest of all home scenes, a poor working woman weighing out her wool before weaving it, to earn a scanty subsistence for herself and for her children. Of course the similes are not all of this kind; it would be monotonous if they were; but they occur often enough to mark their meaning. In the direct narrative, too, we see the same tendency.

Sarpedon struck through the thigh is borne off the field, the long spear trailing from the wound, and there is too much haste to draw it out.

Hector flies past him and has no time to speak; all is dust, hurry, and confusion. Even Homer can only pause for a moment, but in three lines he lays the wounded hero under a tree, he brings a dear friend to his side, and we refresh ourselves in a beautiful scene, when the lance is taken out, and Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the cool air fanning him. We may look in vain through the Nibelungen Lied for anything like this. The Swabian poet can be tender before the battle, but in the battle itself his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and he scents nothing but blood. In the Iliad, on the contrary, the very battles of the G.o.ds, grand and awful as they are, relieve rather than increase the human horror. In the magnificent scene, where Achilles, weary with slaughter, pauses on the bank of the Scamander, and the angry river G.o.d, whose course is checked by the bodies of the slain, swells up to revenge them and destroy him, the natural and the supernatural are so strangely blended, that when Poseidon lights the forest, and G.o.d meets G.o.d and element meets element, the convulsion is too tremendous to enhance the fierceness of Achilles; it concentrates the interest on itself, and Achilles and Hector, flying Trojan and pursuing Greek, for the time melt out and are forgotten.