Part 12
I think it was Andrew Lang who first pointed out that Homer clearly avoids telling stories which are “morally objectionable.” Still more certainly we discover that stories which are quite inoffensive in Homer are excessively “objectionable” in other writers. What is the meaning of this? Is it that later generations defiled the golden innocence of Homeric days in their baser imaginations, or that Homer knew the other, more savage and ancient-seeming versions, and would not recount them? For my part I think Homer knew! And I think he knew about the magic also. There are constant transformations, particularly in the _Iliad_, of gods into human and animal forms. Is that magic or is it not? Surely it is all of a piece with the “shape-shiftings” of wizards, so common in all mythologies; and these are admitted magic. But in the first place these transformations, as we remarked, are treated with a light and veiling hand, and secondly they are confined to the gods. What Homer allows to them he will not allow to mortals. He or his predecessors have erected the distinction between gods and men which forms one of the bases of Greek religion. Nay, you can trace in him, I believe, the beginnings of something more—a reluctance to speak even of the gods as performing these metamorphoses into brutish form. As a rule the Greeks did not mind such tales, or even clung to them from motives which can only be described as “Romantic.” But Homer perhaps softens them down a good deal, and scarcely deserves the censure of Plato, who denounces them who would make a wizard of God. The metamorphoses in Homer are singularly unobtrusive. But why are they there at all? The answer must surely be because they were in the story and could not be left out altogether.
Am I forgetting that Homer was a poet and not a moralist? I think not. I might, with a show of reason, reply that the early Greek poet _was_ a moralist, his aim (as Aristophanes puts it) “to make men better in their cities.” But I prefer to say that Homer’s objection to the monstrous and the grossly magical is really an æsthetic one. Other considerations come in as well, but the æsthetic consideration is found to be in the long run predominant. I once pointed out that many of the similes in Homer turn out, on closer examination, to involve an actual metamorphosis. An actual transformation—say of Athena into a shooting-star—imperceptibly passes into a mere comparison. This is one device for reducing the magical element. But there are others. _So spake she_, says the poet of Helen, when she wondered why her brethren were not to be descried among the Greek host before Troy. _So spake she, but them the life-breathing earth was now holding fast in Lacedaemon, there, in their own native land._ φυσίζοος αἶα, “life-breathing earth,” as unhappy translators must say, derives half its poetical value as Ruskin saw (in this case at least justly enough) from the ancient belief, very strong in old Greece, that Earth was physically the mother of all life, the dear mother of gods and men. Again, who cannot see the passage before his eyes of physical into poetical magic in the lines where Zeus mourns the coming doom of his son Sarpedon? _“When soul and life have left him, send Death and sweet Sleep to carry him until they come to the land of broad Lycia, where his brethren and his kin will make an abiding barrow and pillar for him; for thus we honour the dead.” So Hera spake, and the Father of Gods and men obeyed her counsel; and he let fall blood-drops on the ground, honouring his son, that Patroklos was fated to slay in fruitful Troyland far from his native land._ What is Romantic poetry if this is not? And you see how it is produced? By a veiling of the crudely magical.
It is impossible to resist a little more quotation. _Father_, cries Telemachus to Odysseus, _verily a great marvel is this that I behold with mine eyes. Truly, the walls of the chambers, and the fair bases of the pillars, and the roof-beams of fir, and the columns that hold all on high are shining to my sight as if from flaming fire. Doubtless some god is in the house!_ It is in just such a light that we see all the Homeric world. It is not the witch’s firelight, but it is the light in which the true poetical magic works. _Unhappy, what curse hath come upon you? In darkness your heads are rolled, and your faces, and your knees beneath you; a moan is enkindled, and cheeks are wet, and blood is on the walls and fair pedestals; ghosts in the doorway, ghosts in the courtyard of them that hasten to the dark world below; the sun hath perished out of heaven, and an evil mist is over you!_ So cries in the _Odyssey_ the man with second sight. Is it not all very “Celtic”?
In the ancient _Hymn to Demeter_ Persephone is described as _playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean and culling flowers—rose and crocus and violet over the soft meadow, and iris and hyacinth and narcissus, which, by the will of Zeus, Earth, favouring Him of the Many Guests, sent up to snare the flower-faced maiden a glittering marvel for all to see with wondering eyes, both gods immortal and mortal men:—from the one root an hundred heads of blossom; very sweet the fragrance of that flower, and the delight of it made laugh wide heaven above, and all the earth, and the salt and surging waters._
If this be not “natural magic,” where shall we find it? And is there not something exquisite in the sense or tact which tells the Greek when to stop before the magic becomes too crude or obvious? The Greek poet knows when to stop, the Romantic not always. Here, in another of the _Hymns_, the _Hymn to Dionysus_ (VII), is the frank description of a miracle. _But soon marvellous things were shown among them. First, over the swift black ship sweet, odorous wine was plashing, and a divine perfume arose; and amaze took hold of all the gazing mariners. Anon, along the topmost edge of the sail a vine laid out its tendrils here and there; thick hung the clusters; and round the mast dark ivy twined, deep in flowers and pleasant with berries, and all the thole-pins were garlanded._ For sheer loveliness of fancy it would not be easy to beat that. And how great an effect is gained by temperance! A little more detail and the charm would be dissolved—the ship would be too like a Christmas tree. It is in such wise economies that Greek art is so great. It is just in them that the Romantic is apt to fail. Therein he bewrays his Barbarism.
I will no longer doubt that the reader (who probably did not require the demonstration) is convinced that Greek poetry occasionally attains those very effects of “natural magic” which Arnold denied it. What has happened is merely this: Greek poetry has carried farther than any other a process of refining out some elements in the crude material in which it began. That it may have lost in the process a certain amount of the purest gold I am not denying. I am not pleading the cause of Greek poetry, I am trying to understand it. It is thought by scholars that poetry has everywhere been developed out of a kind of song or chorus, which (to put it gently) is very often magical in character. One at last gets things like some of the Russian folk-songs or the Finnish lays which Lönnrot collected to form the _Kalevala_. It is a pity the _Kalevala_ has not found an adequate English translator. One may honestly wish that Longfellow had translated it instead of giving us _Hiawatha,_ which is a somewhat close imitation. One may delight in _Hiawatha_, but one can see in the baldest translation (as it were with half an eye) that _Kalevala_ is fifty times better. If you want magic, and very delightful magic, go there! It seems to me, remembering, that all the chief characters in the _Kalevala_ are sorcerers. In the very first lay you are lost in the forest of enchantment, and you never get out of it. The _Kalevala_ is not the highest kind of poetry of course; it is (as Mrs. Barbauld complained of _The Ancient Mariner_) too “improbable” for that. But it pleases our taste because it is so desperately “Romantic.”—But you are not going to say that it is as good as the _Odyssey_?
The truth, of course, is that poetry like the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ and the _Agamemnon_, just as much as _The Divine Comedy_ and _Hamlet_, gets beyond these distinctions of Romantic and Classical. I daresay there is as much, in proportion, of this kind of poetry in Greek as even in our own literature. At any rate, there seems to be no doubt that the greatest poetry is not written except on Greek principles. There must be that “fundamental brain-work,” as Rossetti called it, which is the characteristic Greek contribution to art. You may put a less rigid interpretation upon the Hellenic maxims, you may apply them in ever so many new fields, but the essence of them you must keep. The Barbarian may be picturesque enough, but he is not an artist: he loses his head.
It would be enormously interesting to consider how a passage like this—
_I was but seven year auld, When my mither she did dee: My father married the ae warst woman The warld did ever see._
_For she changed me to the laily worm, That lies at the fit o’ the tree, And my sister Masery To the machrel of the sea._
_And every Saturday at noon The machrel comes to me, An’ she takes my laily head An’ lays it on her knee, And kames it wi’ a siller kame, And washes it i’ the sea_—
which is pure magic, such as you might find in the _Kalevala_, is transformed into a passage like
_“O haud your tongue o’ weeping,” he says, “Let a’ your follies a-bee; I’ll show you where the white lilies grow On the banks o’ Italie”_—
which is Romantic poetry at its best—or into
_Now Johnnie’s gude bend-bow is broke, And his gude gray dogs are slain; And his body lies dead in Durrisdeer; And his hunting it is done_—
which is the Classical style very nearly at its best. But an essay must end after a reasonable time. Besides there is something else I want to say about the Classical and the Romantic.
II
Arnold expressed the difference between the Greek and the Celtic or Romantic spirit by the word _Titanism_. That is a very happy expression, happier even than Arnold knew, unless he knew what we said about the Titans. For Titanism is just Barbarism in heroic proportions. It is the spirit of the Old Kings—the “Strainers,” as Hesiod, etymologizing, calls them—who failed because they would not discipline their strength. With some of Arnold’s language about the Celtic character, and the “failure” in practical affairs of the Celtic race, it is unnecessary now for any one to concern himself, for no one now uses that kind of language. Even if it were justified it would scarcely be relevant, since success in literature depends (as of course Arnold saw) on qualities quite other than those which may be relied upon to give us success in life. It is the Titanism of the Celt, says Arnold, which makes him a failure in the world of affairs, but in compensation gives him the gift of style. We need not accept that way of putting the matter, but I do not think we can fairly deny either the style or the Titanism.
The Greeks had their measure of Titanism also, and very certainly their measure of style. Arnold quotes from Henri Martin a description of the Celt as _always ready to react against the despotism of fact_. Whereupon the Greek student instantly remembers that this is just what Cleon said about the Athenians. He will also remember that a Corinthian politician said that they seemed to him to be _born neither to be quiet themselves nor to let other people be quiet_. Any one who fails to notice the unappeasable restlessness of the Greek temperament will miss a great piece of its quality. It comes out in the Greek attitude to Hope, which set ancient hearts beating with a violence which frightened them and extremely surprises us. It comes out in the popular conception of Alexander the Great as one marching on and on in a dream of never-ending victories. It comes out in spite of Arnold. He quotes from Byron:
_Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, ’Tis something better not to be._
He thinks this characteristically Celtic. So perhaps it is. But it is characteristically Greek too. It is a commonplace of Greek poetry. Then he quotes:
_What though the field be lost, All is not lost, the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, Or what is else not to be overcome._
This also he calls Celtic, although he knew his _Prometheus Bound_, and might have reflected that Milton knew it too. At last Arnold flings up his case, and describes a passage quoted to support his antithesis as, up to a certain point, “Greek in its clear beauty”; and when he wishes to find a name for the Celtic “intoxication of style” goes to a Greek poet for his word and comes back with _Pindarism_.
That shows how impossible it is to press these critical distinctions. Still one sees what Arnold is driving at, and one may go with him most of the way. It is quite true that Celtic literature is full of Titanism. But it is an error to say that Titanism is strange to Greek art. There is far more of it in Celtic, and in Romantic literature generally, than in classical literature, and this does produce a striking difference between them. But it is only a difference of method and emphasis. Titanism appeals to the Romantic, and he gives himself up to it. The Greek feels the attraction too, but he fights against it, and over Titanism he puts something which he thinks is better.
Thus it is part of the Romantic mood to love a strange and hyperbolical speech. We see the Romantic poet or his hero like a man increased to superhuman proportions and making enormous gestures in a mist. This effect is not beyond the reach of any true poet, and it has been achieved by Aeschylus better perhaps than by any one before or since. We must return to this point. Here we need only remark that the Greeks could manage the poetical hyperbole when they pleased. But it is only the Romantic, or if you like the Celtic poets, who never tire of it. Again, it is a mistake to believe that there is no symbolism in ancient literature. But what there is differs greatly from modern “Symbolism.” Our “Symbolism” employs certain accepted symbols, which allusively and discreetly recombining it sets the spirit dreaming. Ancient art kept its symbols—I do not know if the word be not misapplied—separate and definite. But it had them. The background of the _Agamemnon_, for instance, is crowded with symbols. It is all lit up by triumphal and ruinous fires with (passing unscathed through it all) the phantasmal beauty of Helen; while students of metre have observed that the heart of the verse beats faster and slower as she comes and goes. This symbolical use of fire, and Helen’s form, of dreams and tempest and purple and much else, is profoundly and intricately studied in the play. But it is not like modern Symbolism, which is often content to gaze ecstatically on the symbol itself, instead of using it dramatically to flood a situation with the light that is hidden in the heart of Time.
So all these differences resolve themselves into a change of attitude, which nevertheless is no small matter. Though not the foundations of life itself, yet man’s reading of life changes; and it is just the play of this inconstant factor upon the fixed bases of the soul which produces that creative ferment from which all art is born.
This may be seen in one matter of peculiar interest in the history of art—the passion of love. One constantly finds it said that Romantic love is a purely mediæval and modern thing. Those who make this statement might reflect that so profound and intimate an emotion is not likely to have been discovered so late in the human story. And it was not. Since there is perhaps a good deal of vagueness in our notions of what Romantic love is, let us take it here to mean the passion whose creed is, in Dryden’s phrase, _All for Love and the World well Lost_. Was such a passion unknown in antiquity? Was not that very phrase of _All for Love_ used of the Greek Cleopatra, who is one of the world’s famous lovers? Did not Medea leave all for love’s sake, and Orpheus, and the shepherd Daphnis, whose legend is the more significant because it appears to be pure folk-story? Have not all poets of Romantic love turned instinctively to Greek mythology as the inexhaustible quarry of their lore? That they treat the myths in their own way is not to be denied. But they would not turn to them at all if they felt that those stories had been moulded by an alien spirit. Then, so far as one can judge from the haplessly scanty fragments of Greek lyrical poetry, the Romantic spirit was strong in that. Sappho and the fine poet Ibykos were wholly given over and enslaved to love; and the great and bitter heart of Archilochus hardly escaped from it with curses. In the Alexandrian era it flowers in poetry anew. One might take perhaps as typical of the extreme Romantic mood the considerable fragment left us of Hermesianax. It is little more than a numbering of famous lovers for pure delight in their names. There is a trifle of childishness in the piece, and a trifle of artificiality, yet it is not without a haunting loveliness like that which clings to the _Catalogue of the Women_ in Homer. It is no accidental kinship. An underground river has burst up again. One finds it flowing unchecked in the _Argonautika_ of Apollonios.
You may have noticed that none of my examples was taken from the greatest period of Greek literature, the Attic age. That also is no accident. For it is then that the hostile spirit most effectively comes in. The capacity for Romantic love was not at any time denied to the Greek nature. But what happened was this: the great age applied, as to the other passions, so to love, its doctrine of _Sophrosyne_. What was the result? Love became terrible and to be shunned in exact proportion to its power over the soul. And on the Greek soul love had great power; no one ought to be mistaken about that. _Of old He has been called a tyrant_, says Plato of Eros. It is a famous saying of Plato again that love is a form of madness. Sophocles, we remember, compared it to a wild beast. Such language is habitual with the Attic poets. (It is used, for example, by both Sophocles and Euripides in the famous odes invoking Eros, the one in _Antigone_, the other in _Hippolytus_.) It is not at all the language of Romance; it does not say _All for Love_. Indeed when we consider it more closely, we find that it means the exact opposite of what the extreme Romantic means. The Greek means that he has conquered, the Romantic that he has surrendered. There is, to be sure, in the Romantic theory, examined in cold blood, a certain amount of bravado. A great imaginative passion is rare enough to be more than a nine days’ wonder. Such an objection has no weight in the world of art, but it is extremely in point when we are contrasting the actual conditions of ancient and modern life. It will turn out in the long run that in ancient Greece men felt love as much as we, but felt about it differently. They were for self-mastery, we for ecstasy. They were Greeks, and we are Barbarians.
They were also, one may believe, in this the truer artists. There is nothing more characteristic of the artist than his capacity to bind his emotions to the service of his art.
_To be in a passion you good may do, But no good if a passion is in you_
is his thought. The man who said that said also _The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction_. The two sentiments are in fact not incompatible, but it takes an artist to reconcile them. The poor plain modern man always divines something immoral in this attitude. As to that, it is easiest to reply that it all depends. But surely the Greek is the only sound artistic doctrine. No one will write very well who cannot control his inspiration. A platitude no doubt, but a platitude which in these days seems very easily forgotten. The mere emotion is not enough. Tannhäuser has suggested great poetry; he could not have written any, for that would have required moral energy.
It might be thought a subterfuge to leave this topic without a word on a matter which cannot be ignored. I believe a very few words will suffice. But it is as well to make clear a point which has not been observed by those who claim the Greek example as a confirmation of their view that all experiences are permissible to the artist. The point is this. It was not in the artistic portion of the Greek people that the kind of sexual perversity, so often indiscriminately attributed to the Hellenes in general, was most widely prevalent. It was chiefly a Dorian vice, fostered by the Dorian camp-life, though I dare say it was to some extent endemic in the Near East. The Ionians (including the Athenians), who inherited nine-tenths of the Hellenic genius, unhesitatingly condemned such practices, even if they themselves were somewhat infected by them. Athenian bourgeois morality was quite sound on that point, as you may see by merely reading Aristophanes. His attitude is really remarkable, and, so far as we can see, there is only one possible explanation: the Athenian people would not tolerate the Dorian sin upon the stage. Yet you know what they did tolerate, and what the comic tradition tolerated. It would take a lot to stop Aristophanes.