Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40

Analogous 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 illustrative 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 nobleness 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 associations, 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 grass 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
illustration 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 gods, 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 god, 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 god meets
god 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.

We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no relief, no
softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of the Odyssey. All is
stern enough and terrible enough there; more terrible, if possible,
because more distinct, than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall.
But there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make against
what we have been saying. It is not delight in slaughter, but it is the
stern justice of revenge which we have here; not, as in the Iliad, hero
meeting hero, but the long crime receiving at last its Divine
punishment; the breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has
been slowly and awfully gathering.

With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illustrating the
conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from
two modern poets--one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his
life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two
has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies,
in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.

The first is from the 'Albigenses' of young Lenau, who has since died
lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such
thoughts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at
Toulouse, and the poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the
scene. 'The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all
silent, dead,--the last sob spent,'--the priest's thanksgiving for the
Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the 'vultures crying
their Te Deum laudamus.'

Hat Gott der Herr den Koerperstoff erschaffen,
Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein boeser Geist,
Darueber stritten sie mit allen Waffen
Und werden von den Voegeln nun gespeist,
Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen,
Die Koerper da sich lassen wohl behagen.

'Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did
some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might
they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit
gorging merrily over their carrion, _without asking from whence it
came_.'

In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death--death has no
terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and
then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed,
or at least passed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most
offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of
death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul,
whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is
what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her
stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a
wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted--doubly revolted, one
would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are
affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we
lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy
of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds
through Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' through 'Hamlet,' through 'Faust;' all
the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few
lines; the sense of wasted nobleness--nobleness spending its energies
upon what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream--at any
rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in
spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to
itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken
down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say, Truth is a
lie; faith is folly; eat, drink, and die,--then his picture would have
been revolting; but the noble spirit remains, though it is borne down
and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is not revolting, but
tragic.

Far different from this--as far inferior in tone to Lenau's lines, as it
exceeds them in beauty of workmanship--is the well-known picture of the
scene under the wall in the Siege of Corinth:--

He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;
So well had they broken a lingering fast
With those who had fallen for that night's repast.
And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,
The foremost of these were the best of his band:

. . . . . . . . .

The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.
Close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf,
There sate a vulture flapping a wolf,
Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,
Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay.

For a parallel to the horribleness of this wonderfully painted scene we
need not go to the Nibelungen, for we shall find nothing like it there:
we must go back to the carved slabs which adorned the banquet halls of
the Assyrian kings, where the foul birds hover over the stricken fields,
and trail from their talons the entrails of the slain.

And for what purpose does Byron introduce these frightful images? Was it
in contrast to the exquisite moonlight scene which tempts the renegade
out of his tent? Was it to bring his mind into a fit condition to be
worked upon by the vision of Francesca? It does but mar and untune the
softening influences of nature, which might have been rendered more
powerful, perhaps, by some slight touch to remind him of his past day's
work, but are blotted out and paralysed by such a mass of horrors.

To go back to Homer.

We must omit for the present any notice of the domestic pictures, of
which there are so many, in the palaces of Ulysses, of Nestor, or of
Alcinous; of the games, so manly, yet, in point of refinement, so
superior even to those of our own middle ages; of the supreme good of
life as the Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they
endeavoured to realise that good. It is useless to notice such things
briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. But the impression
which we gather from them is the same which we have gathered all
along--that if the proper aim of all human culture be to combine, in the
highest measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of
refinement and of manliness, then Homer's age was cultivated to a degree
the like of which the earth has not witnessed since. There was more
refinement under Pericles, as there is more in modern London and Paris;
but there was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more
fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times of
feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere human sense, apart
from any other aspect of the world which is involved in Christianity, it
is difficult to point to a time when life in general was happier, and
the character of man set in a more noble form. If we have drawn the
picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. The shadow was
there, doubtless, though we see it only in a few dark spots. The
Margites would have supplied the rest, but the Margites, unhappily for
us, is lost. Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer to
the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The grand is always more
or less ideal, and the elevation of a moment is sublimed into the spirit
of a life. Comedy, therefore, is essential for the representing of men;
and there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Agamemnon's
greatness was discoloured, like Prince Henry's, by remembering, when he
was weary, that poor creature--small beer--_i.e._ if the Greeks had got
any.

A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged to say that we
find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint which even he is obliged to
cast over the position of women. In the Iliad, where there is no sign of
male slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and though there
does not seem to have been any practice of polygamy, the female
prisoners fell, as a matter of course, into a more degraded position. It
is painful, too, to observe that their own feelings followed the
practice of the times, and that they composed themselves to bear without
reluctance whatever their destiny forced upon them. When Priam ventured
into the Grecian camp for Hector's body, and stood under the roof of
Achilles, he endured to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever
yet endured--to give his hand to his son's destroyer. Briseis, whose bed
was made desolate by the hand of the same Achilles, finds it her one
greatest consolation, that the conqueror stoops to choose her to share
his own. And when Hector in his last sad parting scene anticipates a
like fate for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony of
horror with which such a possible future would be regarded by a modern
husband; nor does Andromache, however bitterly she feels the danger,
protest, as a modern wife would do, that there was no fear for
her--that death by sorrow's hand, or by her own, would preserve her to
rejoin him.

Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, conclusively
fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years'
elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace,
entertaining her husband's guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not
afraid even in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past--in strong
terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing
prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this respect
the Homeric Greeks were better than their contemporaries in Palestine;
and on the whole there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity
when women held a higher place, or the relation between wife and husband
was of a more free and honourable kind.

For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the
theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there
is no doubt that Penelope is Homer's heroine in the Odyssey. One design,
at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of
the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted
on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the
trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter.
Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a
divine [Greek: aoidos], a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand
between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her
passion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty
weary years, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a
child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed
this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again.
The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses.
It is Ulysses's first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find
himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems
only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of
the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of
their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with
himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic
virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we
have scarcely added.

For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The
sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared
in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were
household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic
arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room,
settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In
their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the
saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials.
Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache
worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay,
who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions
as 'drinking the blood of the slain,' might discover, perhaps, a similar
unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat
the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is
unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies,
wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such
fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have
been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of
Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and
only covered with a girdle of leaves--standing still to meet him when
the other girls ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect
conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them,
Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and
tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of
intercourse between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could
only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt
in the way which he has described.

Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has
absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of
writing (at any rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is
a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem
called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer,
about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century B.C.
We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or
popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals,
until writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious
form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to
Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian
conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own
land--Alcaeus, for instance--should have left such a work to be done by a
foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of
the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us,
therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same
with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest
is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and
internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has
been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each
poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are
the work of the same is yet _sub judice_. The Greeks believed they were;
and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style,
yet not greater than the resemblances in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen' and in
the 'Yorkshire Tragedy' to 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet;' and there are more
remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we
read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the
Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad
sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the
creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at
least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style
accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have
tried their hand in their own language with the disputed plays of
Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every way; and we shall best
conclude our own subject by noting down briefly the most striking points
of variation of which as yet no explanation has been attempted. We have
already noticed several: the non-appearance of male slavery in the Iliad
which is common in the Odyssey; the notion of a future state; and
perhaps a fuller cultivation in the female character. Andromache is as
delicate as Nausicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope; and in marked
contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the passage where the
grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is compared to the grief of
a young wife flinging herself on the yet warm body of her husband, and
looking forward to her impending slavery with feelings of horror and
repulsion. But these are among the slightest points in which the two
poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves in the Odyssey, but
there are [Greek: Thetes], or serfs, an order with which we are familiar
in later times, but which again are not in the Iliad. In the Odyssey the
Trojans are called [Greek: epibetores hippon], which must mean _riders_.
In the Iliad, horses are never ridden; they are always in harness.

Wherever in the Odyssey the Trojan war is alluded to (and it is very
often), in no one case is the allusion to anything which is mentioned in
the Iliad. We hear of the wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of
Achilles, the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for his arms. It might be
said that the poet wished to supply afterwards indirectly what he had
left in the Iliad untold; but again, this is impossible, for a very
curious reason. The Iliad opens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused
such bitter woe to the Achaians. In the Odyssey it is still the wrath of
Achilles; but singularly _not with Agamemnon, but with Ulysses_. Ulysses
to the author of the Odyssey was a far grander person at _Troy_ than he
appears in the Iliad. In the latter poem he is great, but far from one
of the greatest; in the other, he is evidently the next to Achilles; and
it seems almost certain that whoever wrote the Odyssey was working from
some other legend of the war. There were a thousand versions of it. The
tale of Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative position
of the heroes was doubtless changed according to the sympathies or the
patriotism of the singer. The character of Ulysses is much stronger in
the Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him--his
soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence--they are held in
very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for
a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the
current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and
then to add--

[Greek:
alla ton huion
geinato heio cherea mache, agore de t' ameino.]

But the Phoeacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on
the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of
human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool. 'The gods,'
Ulysses says, 'do not give all good things to all men, and often a man
is made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favour they fling, like a
garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people delight to _look_ on
him. He speaks with modest dignity, and he shines among the multitude.
As he walks through the city, men gaze on him as on a god.'

Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. The very
slightest external evidence would weigh them all down together. Perhaps
the following may be of more importance:--

In both poems there are 'questionings of destiny,' as the modern phrase
goes. The thing which we call human life is looked in the face--this
little chequered island of lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean
of darkness; and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds
for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the last words of
Ecclesiastes, 'Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the
whole duty of man.' But the world bears a different aspect, and the
answer looks different in its application. In the Iliad, in spite of the
gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of
life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for
anything beyond--nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men,
the gods, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we
know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are
breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the moral mysteries of
our being hang like a mist over us from the beginning to the end; and
the cloud from time to time descends on the actors, and envelopes them
with a preternatural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression of
'suffering being the lot of mortals,' as if it had been abused already
for ungodly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves
the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the gods, when they
themselves, in spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in
their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pass
from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when
among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals,
those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor
divine--at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus,
or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there is a strangeness even in
the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home
across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that
unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many
Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit
death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to
stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40