Part 11

The suggestion I have to offer may be helpful or not. But it has two qualities which should make it worth entertaining, if only for the moment: it is easily understood, and it is easily tested. My suggestion is that Classical art is an expression of Hellenism and Romantic art of Barbarism, so far as Barbarism is capable of expression.

Here I feel the want of something beyond my own instinct in discerning the Classical from the Romantic. To distinguish them is never perfectly easy: in the greatest art it is thought to be impossible. In the end one has to rely upon oneself, for nobody is pleased with a second-hand or impersonal criticism. If you happen to care for literature, you will not be content with discussions of it which do not help you to realize the thing you love. As to the words “Classical” and “Romantic,” they have become current coin with us, and yet they are coin without fixed value. Thus when Mr. Shaw attacks the “Romance” which Stevenson adored, it is clear that they cannot mean the same thing. What, then, do they mean? It is very hard to find out. You may read that Romance is the spirit of the Middle Ages, or the spirit of the German forest; but you find yourself left to your own interpretation of Mediævalism or Fairyland. As for the “Renaissance of Wonder”—that of course is just beautiful nonsense.

The clearest words on the matter are Matthew Arnold’s. There is a kind of justice in this, for Arnold’s criticism was perpetually engaged in the issue between the Romantic and the Classical. Himself (as his best poetry shows) a Romantic at heart, he stood in the middle of the Romantic triumph pleading for the austerities of art. That alone proves his genius for criticism. It also gives him a special right to be heard. As I shall seem to be attacking Arnold, it will be better for me to say now that with his general attitude and temper I am in intimate sympathy. I am disposed to think that his statement of the Classical case is the best that has yet been made. In some points I think it is even too favourable; in others not favourable enough. That is all.

_The forest solitude_, he says in his book “On the Study of Celtic Literature,” _the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature—that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism—that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and her fairy charm_. And on the way to this attribution and this denial he distinguishes four modes of handling nature. _There is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added._

One need not deny the value of these distinctions. But, admitting them, must we confess that there is no “natural magic” in the Greeks? Of your grace listen a little to Homer in prose. _As the numerous nations of winged birds—wild geese or cranes or long-throated swans—in the Asian Mead about the runnels of Kaÿster stream make little flights and flights in the glory of their pinions, alighting with cries which make the marish ring._ Is there no natural magic in that? Or in this? _As when torrents running down a mountain into a cañon hurl together their violent waters from large springs in a deep watercourse, and the shepherd on far-off mountains hears their thunder?_ Or consider this. _As when the glare of a blazing fire is seen by sailors out at sea burning at some lonely shieling high up among the hills._ Again we read: _They clomb Parnassus, steep forest-clad hill, and soon came to the windy gullies. The sun was then smiting the fields with his earliest rays out of the quiet, deep-running river of the world; and the beaters came to the glade._ A last example: _As when Pandion’s daughter, the greenwood nightingale, sings beautifully at the start of spring, perched in a place of leafy trees, with running variable note she sheds abroad her far-heard song, mourning the end of Itylus_. Is there no magic in all this?

Still, it is uncritical to attempt to carry the critical judgment by storm. You will of course admit the glory and intoxication of these Homeric similes, but you may still feel that Arnold’s distinction is not finally swept away by them. Something in the lines he quotes—Keats’s

_Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn;_

Shakespeare’s

_On such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love To come again to Carthage_——

something there may be felt to express a more personal or intimate relation to nature than anything I have yet quoted from Homer. Shall I then quote more to show that even this touch Homer has got? _He burned him with his inlaid arms and heaped a grave-mound over him; and round it the hill-nymphs planted elms._ Is not that final touch magical enough? And surely there is intimacy here. _As when the great deep glooms with silent swell, dimly foreboding the hurrying path of the piping winds._ And the personal note, is it not audible here? _And now in a rocky place of lonely hills, at Sipylos, where couch the nymphs (men say) whose feet are swift on Acheloïos’ banks—there changed to stone she broods upon the wrongs that gods have wrought her._ And here are two passages of love, of love in a Romantic setting, if we mean anything by that at all. _Under them the divine earth sent up sudden grass and dewy lotus and crocus and hyacinth thick and soft, upbearing them from the ground. Thereon they lay, folded in a beautiful golden cloud that dropped a glimmer of dew._ That is the love of Zeus and Hera. What follows tells of the desire of Poseidon for Tyro. _She conceived a love of divine Enîpeus, fairest by far of rivers flowing over the earth, and haunted the fair waters of Enîpeus. Therefore the Earth-Embracer and Earth-Shaker made himself like Enîpeus and lay with her at the outflowings of the eddying river; then a darkling wave rose mountain-like about them and hung over them, hiding the god and the mortal woman._ Does not this possess the magical touch?

It is in Homer everywhere. In all his dealings with nature he adds to his words not merely lightness and brightness, but something magical as well. If he does not do it, no poet does. Why, Homer’s very “fixed epithets” are surcharged with magic. Think of his epithets for the dawn alone—κροκόπεπλος, _saffron-robed_; χρυσόθρονος, _golden-throned_; ῥοδοδάκτυλος, _rose-fingered_—the Romantic poets have always envied them. It is impossible to deny the magical, Romantic quality to Homer, unless you make an admission with which I shall deal in a moment. And Homer is not alone among Greek poets in the possession of “natural magic”; one might almost say all the great Greek poets have it. Almost the loveliest words that Sappho has left us are little broken fragments of description as imaginatively touched as anything in Keats or Coleridge. Such are the fragments translated by Rossetti, and the fragment of the sleepless woman crying to the stars for her lover. There are the few lines of Alcman, comparing him to “the sea-blue bird of spring,” which are enough to put him not too far from Sappho and Coleridge themselves. And Aeschylus in _Prometheus Bound,_ and Euripides in the _Bacchae_—have they got no feeling for Romantic nature? Then there is Pindar. Why, Pindar has almost more of it than any one. Remember the strange splendour like a windy sunset of the great _Fourth Pythian_ ode, telling of Jason in marvellous lands. Repeat a line or two: _Coming to the margin of the whitening sea, alone in the dark he called aloud upon the roaring Master of the Trident; and he appeared to him anigh at his foot._ Or take this of the new-born Iamos, whom his mother Euadne “exposed”: _But he was hidden in the rush and the boundless brake, his delicate body splashed with the yellow and deep purple glory of pansies_. Is there “natural magic” there, or is there not?

Two things, perhaps, misled Arnold, both of them just and true. The first was the feeling of a radical difference somewhere between Classical and Romantic art. The second was the insignificance in Greek literature of magic pure and simple, the magic of fairies and witches. Greek literature deals sparingly in this sort of magic, while it is part of the stock-in-trade of Romance. It looks as if Arnold were unconsciously arguing that the Romantic passion for magic professed ought somehow to make itself felt in descriptions of nature, while the Greek dislike of magic would disable the Classical poet from seeing her with the enchanted eyes of the Celt. Now there is an element of truth in this, though not, I think, a very important element. It may be suggested that in all true poetry, whether Classical or Romantic, Greek or Celtic, mere vulgar magic is transmuted into that infinitely finer and lovelier thing which Arnold, in claiming it for Keats and Shakespeare, calls “natural magic”; which may be more abundant in Romantic poetry, but is present just the same in Homer and Pindar.

One is led to this conjecture about the train of Arnold’s thought when one reads the quotations he has selected to illustrate the special appeal of Celtic Romance. They mainly come from the _Mabinogion_ in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation. Although it seems a pity that Arnold must draw his shafts from one quiver, and that not his own, still the _Mabinogion_ is beautiful enough, and the translation so readable, that it is not clear where he could have found, for people who have no Welsh or Irish, better illustrations. He quotes the words of Math to Gwydion when Gwydion wished a wife for his pupil. _“Well,” says Math, “we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers.” So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower Aspect._ It is a famous passage since Arnold quoted it; and if we are to have magic, let it always be as beautiful as this; for I am far from denying the beauty of many a magical rite. But magic you see it is, magic palpable and practical—not the magic of

_And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face;_

which is the true poetical magic and something yet more attractive.

Arnold immediately proceeds from this to a passage in which the Celtic writer describes the dropping of blood as _faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest._ Well, Homer says, _Gladness fell upon his spirit like dew upon the ears of ripening corn when there is a rustling in the fields._ The Celtic passage is the more exquisite, at any rate than Homer in my prose. But between these two passages who would say that there is an essential difference? It is not maintained that Homer writes in this manner as often as a Romantic poet; and that is a difference worth remarking. But I do assert that he can write so when he likes, and as well as any.

Now what if this finer poetic magic is really a subtilization of the crude appeal of practical magic? Something like this Arnold almost suggests. What if Homer’s and Keats’s magic entrances us in part because somewhere in us sleeps a memory of miracles wrought in days when every rock and tree and river was alive with supernatural force? There is nothing fantastic in such a speculation. If we entertain it, we may find it illuminating the whole field of this discussion. At once we recall the almost incredibly vast and almost wildly “Romantic” mythology of Greece, the material and the inspiration of Greek poetry as it was the material and inspiration of Keats. Now the genuine mythology of Hellas first gathered shape in an age which believed in obvious magic, in the transformation of men and women into birds and beasts and trees and flowers, and in the living holiness of natural objects. Its origin is not explicable on any other hypothesis. We have therefore to consider how it happened that Greek poetry, born (we must believe) in an atmosphere as redolent of magic as this mythology implies, came to divest itself of vulgar magic and “Celtic vagueness,” till it came to appear to a critic like Arnold devoid also of the touch which he thinks exclusively characteristic of Romance.

It happened, no doubt, as part of that whole reaction to Barbarism which we call Hellenism. For magic is barbaric. The peoples all about Hellas believed in it of course, and had magicians practising it. In Greece itself the belief in magic lingered throughout Greek history, lingered that is to say in secluded places and among the many unenlightened. We hear of _Epôdoi_, “Charmers”; of _Goêtes_, “Groaners”; of _Baskanoi_, who had the evil eye—three varieties of wizard. There are echoes of a popular credence in the magical to be heard even in Greek literature, that disdainful and fastidious thing. In Homer we read that the wound received by Odysseus from the boar of Parnassus was closed by repeating an incantation over it. There is a good deal of white magic in the _Works and Days_ of Hesiod. Nearly half of Aeschylus’ _Choêphoroi_ consists in an invocation or evocation of the ghost of dead Agamemnon. And so on. In later Hellenistic times there existed a great body of magical writings, born of the contact between Greek civilization and Oriental superstition. There must have been a public for this stuff. Professional miracle-workers were not uncommon, and some of them won a resounding popularity. The book of Pausanias, who wrote down what he heard and saw in the greater part of Greece at the beginning of the second Christian century is strongly and—to you and me—pleasantly redolent of immemorial customs and beliefs among the peasantry. Many of these are plainly magical in their nature or their origin. The priests of Lykaian Zeus, he tells us, used to bring rain by dipping a branch in a certain stream and shaking it, sprinkling waterdrops. That, of course, was sheer magic—“making rain” as an African medicineman would say. A custom of this sort, which has become a ritual, may be kept up after people have ceased quite to believe in the doctrine which it assumes as true. That, however, does not touch the historical significance of the custom, which must have arisen among people who believed in magic. Besides, the peasants in Pausanias’ day were clearly very superstitious. His book is the proof of that. To suppose that in this respect they differed widely from their ancestors is to suppose something which common sense cries out against, and what evidence there is refutes.

Hellenism, then, the flower of the Greek spirit, grew in a soil impregnated with superstition, or, if you do not care for that word, with a religion containing many elements of magic. Every modern student of the subject, I fancy, admits that, although some scholars make more of the magical elements, some less. What no one can deny is that Hellenism tends to reject magic, and tries to expel it from human life. Magic was barbaric, and Hellenism was in reaction against Barbarism. Very likely the reaction went too far; reactions usually do. Very likely something too much was sacrificed to “Greek sanity.” But it would be strange ingratitude on our part to forget that it was this very urgency for the sane, for the rational, which ensured that our civilization was founded on hard realistic thinking, and not on a mere drift of emotionality. The task of thinking things out to their end, even to their bitter end, which was so characteristic of the Greeks, peculiarly fitted them for their task of laying intellectual foundations. It is not an English characteristic, and for that reason we are the more indebted to them. But scarcely less unjust would it be to suppose that the Greeks sacrificed everything to the rational. Nothing of the sort. They felt the charm to which the Celtic imagination yielded itself so utterly. But out of magic could not be built, they thought, any helpful philosophy or sound method of art. So their literature, when it deals with this matter and deals with it at its best, consciously or instinctively aims at drawing from it its full value for the imagination without for a moment permitting it to subdue the judgment. Any one reading in turn Mr. Yeats’s _The Shadowy Waters_ and that part of the _Odyssey_ which deals with the adventures of Odysseus in magic-haunted lands will see what I mean. Yeats’s hero yields himself to the charm; Odysseus fights against it. Which is the wiser is a question I leave to you. But here we have, in an illustration that is almost an epigram, the difference between the Celtic or extreme Romantic temper and the Hellenic temper. The Celt hears the Sirens and follows them; the Greek hears them and unwillingly sails past.

Or you may say: the Celtic gift is vision, the Hellenic gift is light.

Observe Homer’s dealings with magic. He often finds himself in its presence, and he deals with it in various ways. He leaves it out, he veils it, he transforms it. I am unable to see on what real grounds we can follow one of the most eminent of English scholars in Homer in dividing off the rest of the Homeric poems from those books of the _Odyssey_ which tell of Odysseus’ wanderings in unknown lands and seas. When does magic cease to be magic? Is it magic when Circe in the Odyssean fairyland changes men into swine, and not magic when Athena in Ithaca changes Odysseus into a beggar and herself into a bird? However, what Dr. Leaf has in mind is rather a difference which he feels in the whole atmosphere of these fairyland books, which the ancients knew by the title of the _Narrative to Alkinoos_, from the rest of the _Odyssey_ and from the _Iliad_. The _Narrative_, he thinks, moves in places which it is hopeless to look for in the map. The geography of the rest is really to be found on the map, if you only know where to look for it. I might agree with this and yet hold (as I should) that the geographical point is deceptive. Odysseus does pass out of known into unknown lands, but he does not pass out of one atmosphere into another. There are more miracles and magic in the _Narrative_ than in the rest of Homer, but the treatment of them is the same. Or, to put it somewhat differently, Phaeakia is just as real to me as Troy or Ithaca. And I fancy it was just as real to Homer.

After all, there is really very little overt magic in the _Narrative_, even if we include the wonder-working of the goddess Circe and other divine beings, who might be said to perform miracles rather than practise witchcraft. Of this wonder-working observe how little is made: just as little as possible. The transformation and retransformation of Odysseus’ companions is told in a line or two. Think what the _Kalevala_ or the _Arabian Nights_ would have made of it. The whole necromantic business of the Descent to Hades in the eleventh book of the _Odyssey_ is transacted in a few formal, ritualistic phrases. Originally all that matter must have been steeped in magic. It is the same with Homer’s treatment of the monstrous. The Homeric spirit objects to monsters; and so you never notice, unless you look closely at the text, what horrible creatures the Sirens were. Scylla and Charybdis are not fully described; much is left to the reader’s imagination. The Cyclops, it must be allowed, is different. Homer, you see, _had_ to make him eat Odysseus’ men and _had_ to put his eye out; the story would not tell otherwise. But somehow the passage is not so ghastly as one would expect. It is full of remorseless description—the Cyclops vomits “wine and bits of human flesh”—and yet despite such “realism” the poet contrives to enfold our spirits in an air of enchantment—the true poetical enchantment—in which all things are at once vivid and remote, like a dream freshly remembered.

Homer of course is a problem, about which it is very hard to say anything that pleases everybody. There are on the one side scholars who think that our _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are only the final versions of two traditional poems, which were handled by many poets through a long succession of years. On the other side are those who believe that the two poems are entirely, or substantially, the work of a single early poet, who rose so far above his predecessors as to owe little or nothing to them. This makes it difficult to argue a point in Homer with any general acceptance. But no student now seems to deny that Homer—whether we give the name to the one exceptional early poet or (tentatively) to the last of all those who worked on the poems—inherited something of his material. He did not invent the history of Troy, and he had to deal with it as he found it. Now all this traditional matter—for the matter is traditional whether the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ themselves are traditional poems or not—must to all appearance have been saturated in the magical. That is the normal condition of the stuff in which poetry, so far as we can see, everywhere takes its rise. Besides, the mythology of Greece, which it is fair to call the stuff of Greek poetry, is full of magic. The inference is that Homer and the Greek poets in general till the end of the “Classical” period sought to work out of their matter all that savoured of the magical.