No More Learning

It is
difficult to imagine backwards into the time when self-consciousness was
still so fresh from its emergence out of the mere tribal consciousness
of savagery, that it must not only accept the fact, but first intensely
_realize_, that man is hokymorotatos--a thing of swiftest doom. And it
was for men who were able, and forced, to do that, that the _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_ and the other early epics were composed. But life is not
only short; it is, in itself, _valueless_. "As the generation of leaves,
so is the generation of men. " The life of man matters to nobody but
himself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just
happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man
himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must
create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of
the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word
"Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not
felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the
intensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. For
where will the primitive instinct of man, where will the hero, find the
chance of creating a value for life? In danger, and in the courage that
welcomes danger. That not only evaluates life; it derives the value from
the very fact that forces man to create value--the fact of his swift and
instant doom--hokymorotatos once more; it makes this dreadful fact
_enjoyable_. And so, with courage as the value of life, and man thence
delightedly accepting whatever can be made of his passage, the doom of
life is not simply suffered; man enacts his own life; he has mastered
it.

We need not say that this is the lesson of Homer.
And all this, barely
stated, is a very different matter from what it is when it is poetically
symbolized in the vast and shapely substance of the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantly
and externally, the _Iliad_ with its pressure of thronging life and its
daring unity, and the _Odyssey_ with its serener life and its superb
construction, though much more sectional unity. But we do not appreciate
what Homer did for his time, and is still doing for all the world, we do
not appreciate the spirit of his music, unless we see the warfare and
the adventure as symbols of the primary courage of life; and there is
more in those words than seems when they are baldly written. And it is
not his morals, but Homer's art that does that for us. And what Homer's
art does supremely, the other early epics do in their way too. Their way
is not to be compared with Homer's way. They are very much nearer than
he is to the mere epic material--to the moderate accomplishment of the
primitive ballad. Apart from their greatness, and often successful
greatness, of intention, perhaps the only one that has an answerable
greatness in the detail of its technique is _Beowulf_. That is not on
account of its "kennings"--the strange device by which early popular
poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the
magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it
does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called
"whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting
nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or
"heaven's gem. " On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate,
ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a
somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way
the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load
of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he
means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought
meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous
clumsiness. Yet _Beowulf_ has what we do not find, out of Homer, in the
other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of
phrasing.