No More Learning

Courage is in
the one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equally
important is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a great
deal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wants
above everything is to be admired--"always to be the best"; that is what
true heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike at
him; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, the
meanest man living is better than a dead hero. Death ends everything, as
far as he is concerned, honour and all; his courage looks for no reward
hereafter. No; but _since_ ten thousand fates of death are always
instant round us; _since_ the generations of men are of no more account
than leaves of a tree; _since_ Troy and all its people will soon be
destroyed--he will stand in death's way. Sarpedon emphasizes this with
its converse: There would be no need of daring and fighting, he says,
of "man-ennobling battle," if we could be for ever ageless and
deathless. That is the heroic age; any other would say, If only we could
not be killed, how pleasant to run what might have been risks! For the
hero, that would simply not be worth while. Does he find them pleasant,
then, just because they are risky? Not quite; that, again, is to detach
part of the meaning from the whole. If anywhere, we shall, perhaps, find
the whole meaning of Homer most clearly indicated in such words as those
given (without any enforcement) to Achilles and Thetis near the
beginning of the _Iliad_, as if to sound the pitch of Homer's poetry:

meter, hepi m hetekes ge minynthadion per heonta,
timen per moi hophellen Olympios engyalixai
Zeus hypsibremetes. [8]
* * * * *
timeson moi yion hos hokymorotatos hallon
heplet'. [9]

Minunthadion--hokymorotatos: those are the imporportant words;
key-words, they might be called. If we really understand these lines, if
we see in them what it is that Agamemnon's insult has deprived Achilles
of--the sign and acknowledgment of his fellows' admiration while he is
still living among them, the one thing which makes a hero's life worth
living, which enables him to enact his Hell--we shall scarcely complain
that the _Iliad_ is composed on a second-rate subject.
The significance
of the poem is not in the incidents surrounding the "Achilleis"; the
whole significance is centred in the Wrath of Achilles, and thence made
to impregnate every part.

Life is short; we must make the best of it. How trite that sounds! But
it is not trite at all really. It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe
that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments
that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original
metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual. 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?