No More Learning

[6]

That, you might say, is Homer at his ease; when he exerts himself you
get a miracle like:

su den strophalingi koniaes
keiso megas megalosti, lelasmenos hipposunaon. [7]

It seems the art of one who walked through the world of things endowed
with the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort that
looks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience into
incorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre at
milking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The shape and
clamour of waves breaking on the beach in a storm is as irresistibly
recorded by Homer as the gleaming flowers which earth put forth to be
the bed of Zeus and Hera in Gargaros, when a golden cloud was their
coverlet, and Sleep sat on a pine tree near by in the likeness of a
murmuring night-jar. It is an art so balanced, that when it tells us,
with no special emphasis, how the Trojans came on with a din like the
clangour of a flock of cranes, but the Achaians came on in silence, the
temper of the two hosts is discriminated for the whole poem; or, in the
supreme instance, when it tells us how the old men looked at Helen and
said, "No wonder the young men fight for her! " then Helen's beauty must
be accepted by the faith of all the world. The particulars of such
poetry could be enumerated for pages; and this is the poetry which is
filled, more than any other literature, in the _Iliad_ with the nobility
of men and women, in the _Odyssey_ with the light of natural magic. And
think of those gods of Homer's; he is the one poet who has been able to
make the dark terrors of religion beautiful, harmless and quietly
entertaining. It is easy to read this poetry and simply _enjoy_ it; it
is easy to say, the man whose spirit held this poetry must have been
divinely happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe learnt that the
function of man is "to enact Hell. "

Goethe is profoundly right; though possibly he puts it in a way to which
Homer himself might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably has its
point in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferred
the point to come in the word "enact. " In any case, the details of
Christian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe's
epigram. There is truth in it, not simply because the two poems take
place in a theatre of calamity; not simply, for instance, because of the
beloved Hektor's terrible agony of death, and the woes of Andromache and
Priam. Such things are the partial, incidental expressions of the whole
artistic purpose. Still less is it because of a strain of latent
savagery in, at any rate, the _Iliad_; as when the sage and reverend
Nestor urges that not one of the Greeks should go home until he has lain
with the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, or as in the tremendous words of
the oath: "Whoever first offend against this oath, may their brains be
poured out on the ground like this wine, their own and their children's,
and may their wives be made subject to strangers.
" All that is one of
the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in
Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those
famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared--such
speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or
of Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean,
however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly be
missed if they are _detached_ for consideration; especially we shall
miss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches the
substantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. 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'.