Homer"s contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his _Works and Days_ of the plebeian and peasant life of his time. Hesiod had not the grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of the English Crabbe. It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.
Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from the background of his own day. Nor did Shakespeare, trying to paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London prentices, cobblers and the like. Learned Ben, on the other hand, contrives in his _Seja.n.u.s_ and his _Catiline,_ by dint and sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson; never a pterodactyl walks down _his_ Piccadilly. But Shakespeare rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less Greek, he had to create his human beings--draw them from the life, and from the life he saw about him. The deeper you see into life, the less the costumes and academic exact.i.tudes matter; you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the externals worry about themselves. Now Homer was a deal more like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference: he was trying to create Greeks of a n.o.bler order than his contemporaries. Men in those days, he says, were of huger stature than they are now. And yet, when his imagination is not actually at work to heighten and enn.o.ble the portrait of a hero, real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes--to obtrude on him. So he lets in bits now and again that belong to the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of Hesiod"s dismal picture.
Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his songs," as Hesiod says in the pa.s.sage from which I quoted just now, "in the ancient sacred hymns." As Shakespeare was first an actor, then a tinkerer of other men"s plays, then a playwright on his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker of new ones. He saw the wretched condition of his people, contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.
His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compa.s.sion working as yoke-fellow with race-pride. You shall see presently how the intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression: he had seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to fate no quality but cruelty. Impa.s.sioned by what we may call patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for Greek epic: the story of a Greek contest with and victory over West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth the hand of the great enemy, fate. In different moods and at different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.
And the Odyssey? Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his old age. Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all. Someone says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than from that of Homer. I do not know. It is a better story than the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind. Yet it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are discrepant and incompatible parts.
There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed down unwritten for several centuries. Well; I can imagine the Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me Homer must have written or dictated them at first. Writing in Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times. It is now, anywhere, to illiterates. In Caesar"s day, as he tells us, it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but the people did not. It seems probable that writing was not in general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me, certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of writing. Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since Lemurian days. When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.
Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer? What can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the picture I have attempted to make? Very little; yet perhaps something. I think his historical importance is greater, for us now, than his literary importance. I doubt you shall find in him as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example. I doubt he was an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious mind the truths that make men free. Plato did not altogether approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not fear to follow. I think the great Master-Poets of the world have been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul. I believe that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated. He pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation: his fame is chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and use their hats for speaking-trumpets. We have in English no approximately decent translation of him. Someone said that Pope served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince was moved to cry: "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!"
It is not so; to call Pope an a.s.s would be to wrong a faithful and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true respect. Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would loathe Homer. Pope held that water should manifest, so to say, through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to be from the Kitchen-tap--or even from the sewer. Homer was more familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands. Which p.r.o.nunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous sea-epithet: the thunder-on-the-precipices of
_poluphloisboio thala.s.ses,_
or the lisping-on-the-sands of
_ poluphleesbeeo thala.s.sace?_
(pardon the attempted phonetics).--For truly there are advocates of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to Mr. Pope.
As to his style, his manner or movement: to summarize what Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct and rapid as Scott"s; as lucid as Wordsworth"s could be; but n.o.ble like Shakespeare"s or Milton"s. There is no Dantesque periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly, clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is r.e.t.a.r.dation often by long similes.) And he either made a language for himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the p.r.o.nunciation. But give the vowels merely a plain English value, certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music. Perhaps some of you have read Mathew Arnold"s great essay _On Translating Homer,_ and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.
A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels--to some effect. Newman had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.
There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman"s side. Homer"s huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity, designate imperfections: therein following De Quincey, who read Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a critic, saw things sometimes. _Bonus dormitat Homerus,_ says Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked." He was the product of a great creative force; which did not however work in a great literary age: and all I am going to say is merely a bearing out of this.
First there is his poverty of epithets. He repeats the same ones over and over again. He can hardly mention Hector without calling him _megas koruthaiolos Hector,_--"great glittering- helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) _Hectoros hippodamoio_-- "of Hector the tamer of war-steeds." Over and over again we have _anax andron Agamemnon;_ or "swift-footed Achilles." Over and over again is the sea _poluphloisbois-terous,_ as if he could say nothing new about it. Having discovered one resounding phrase that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his imagination as to flash some new revelation on it. As if Hamlet should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet as "the hesitating Dane."...... But think how the Myriad-minded One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up new revelatory figures and epithets about everything: how he could not afford to repeat himself, because there were not enough hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but pa.s.s you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer, with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.
Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you a resounding glory. What means this most familiar one, think you:
_Ten d"apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?_
--Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed? But no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted Hector;" or _tout simplement,_ "Hector answered." And hardly can anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums:
_Ton d"emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon.
Hos phato. Ten d"outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus_
--whereafter at seven lines down we get again:
_Ten de meg" ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;_
--in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and unskill. It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators, whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear. But you will remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer"s--would still be greater, could we be sure of Homer"s tones and vowel- values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the Soul and the Eternal.
Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly. If it is true that his reputation gains on the principle of _Omne ignotum pro magnifico_--because he is unknown to most that praise him--let none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry. His faults--to call them that--are such as you would expect from his age, race, and peculiar historic position; his virtues are drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from the Unfathomable that flowed through him. He had the high serious att.i.tude towards the great things, and treated them highly, deeply and seriously. We may compare him to Dante: who also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with a huge racial inspiration. But Dante had something more: a purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul.
Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as "the most important poetical monument existing." Well; cultured Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say.
But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe--to name only poets of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul- symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.
Here, to me, is another sign of primitivism. If there is paucity of imagination in his epithets, there is none whatever in his surgery. I do not know to what figure the casualty list in the Iliad amounts; but believe no wound or death of them all was dealt in the same bodily part or in the same way. Now Poetry essentially turns from these physical details; her preoccupations are with the Soul.
"From Homer and Polygnotus," says Goethe, "I daily learn more and more that in our life here above the ground we have, properly speaking, to enact h.e.l.l." A truth, so far as it goes: this Earth is h.e.l.l; there is no h.e.l.l, says H.P. Blavatsky, but a man- bearing planet. But we demand of the greatest, that they shall see beyond h.e.l.l into Heaven. Homer achieves his grandeur oftenest through swift glimpses of the pangs and tragedy of human fate; and I do not think he saw through the gloom to the bright Reality. Watching the Greek host from the walls of Troy, Helen says:
"Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia; Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember; Two, two only remain whom I see not among the commanders, Castor, fleet in the car, Polydeukes, brave with the cestus-- Own dear brethren of mine,--one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the sh.o.r.es of loved Lacedaimon?
Or, though they came with the rest in the ships that bound through the waters, Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes, All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?"
And then:
_Hos phato. Tous d"ede kalechen phusizoos aia, En Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie._
"--So spake she; but they long since under Earth were reposing There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaimon."
[From Dr. Hawtrey"s translation, quoted by Matthew Arnold in _On Translating Homer._]
There it is the sudden ant.i.thesis from her gentle womanly inquiry about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner. Then there is that pa.s.sage about Peleus and Cadmos:
"Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor G.o.dlike Cadmos, might know the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness known to mortals was granted them: the one on the mountain, the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded Muses sing."
You hear the high pride and pathos in that. To be a poet, he says: to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing: is the highest happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace happiness of feeling secure against dark fate. It is the same feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand manner. The pride is lacking quite: the intuition for a divinity within man. But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and pet-hood against the sorrow of fate: even though he finds the sorrow weighs it down. Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said: "It is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have many recompenses." How different the note of Milton:
"Those other two, equal with me in fate, So were I equal with them in renown--"
or:
"Unchanged, though fallen on evil days; On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, In darkness, and by dangers compa.s.sed round."
And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have antic.i.p.ated the blows of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been astonished at fate"s presumption.
We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:
_Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai_--
"Thou to, we hear, old man, e"en thou was at once time happy;"
_Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin Zoein achnumenous. Autoi de l"akedees eisin_--
"The G.o.ds have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful, Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."
Proud--no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense; there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty resignation. As if he said: We are miserable; there is nothing else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss about.--It is the restraint--a very Greek quality--the depth hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all--that make in these cases his grand manner. His att.i.tude is, I think, nearer the Teutonic than the Celtic:--his countrymen, like the Teutons, were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night. But he and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did not. His eyes, like Llywarch"s or Oisin"s, were fixed on a past glory beyond the nightfall.
But where does this Homeric mood lead us? To no height of truth, I think. Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature of the future and the grandest things it should utter,--for the life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the Soul--when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is Joy." Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the veil that hides it. G.o.d knows we see enough of the veil; but the poet"s business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show the brightness which it hides. If the personality were all, and a man"s whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave; then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon its true path and mission.
I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad: the pa.s.sion and spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough to let him see this outward world: personalities, with their motive-springs of action within themselves: his greatness, his sympathy, his compa.s.sion, revealed all that to him; but he lacked vision for the Meanings. I found him then less than Shakespeare: whose clear knowledge of human personalities-- ability to draw living men--was but incidental and an instrument; who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma, and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the triumph of the soul, the Magician, in _The Tempest._ And I count him less than that Blind t.i.tan in Bardism, who, setting out to justify the ways of G.o.d to men, did verily justify the ways of fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the Celtic bards, that in the very depths of h.e.l.l the Soul has not yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior to h.e.l.l, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;--I count him less than the "Evening Dragon" of _Samson Agonistes,_ whose last word to us is
"Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt."
And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his journey
.... _pei dolci pomi Promessi a me per lo verace Duca; Ma fino al centro pria convien ch"io tomi:_--