GIFT OF JANE K0.SATHER ^' ^ lit^ ^ 0-s r .LECTUEES 01^ GREEK POETRY BY J. W. MACKAIL M.A., LL.D. SOMETIME FELLOW OP BALLIOL COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OP OXFORD LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1910 19 All rights reserved VA 1:5' j/^^ a new song, a free song. Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high, On floats the sea in distant blue careering through its channels. On floats the wind over the breast of the sea setting in toward land, The great steady wind from loest or west-hy -south. Floating so buoyant mth milk-white foam on the toaters. But I am not the sea nor the red sun, 1 am not the wind with girlish laughter, Not the immense wind which strengthens, not the wind which lashes. Not the spirit that ever lashes its own body to terror and death, But I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings. 2n9fii.'^ PAGE iz CONTENTS Introduction Homer — I. The Homeric Question .... 3 II. Homer and the Iliad .... 23 III. The Homeric Epic . . . . . 49 The Lyric Poets— I. The Age op Freedom: Sappho ... 83 II. The Age op Concentration: Simonides . 113 Sophocles . . . . . . . . . 139 After Athens — I. The Alexandrians 177 II. Theocritus and the Idyl .... 208 III. Apollonius op Rhodes and the Komantic Epic 239 a 2 INTRODUCTION The lectures contained in this volume were given during the last four years from the Chair of Poetry in the University of Oxford. With these lectures is also now incorporated the substance of a paper read before the Classical Association at its General Meeting at Birming- ham in October 1908. While the lectures were planned in relation to one another as parts of a single continuous scheme, the circumstances of their delivery, at long intervals, and to an audience which (like poetry itself) is being perpetually renewed, implied a large amount of re- capitulation and repetition. In revising them for publication, I have thought it best not to alter their form very materially in this respect ; and I hope that the amount of repetition still left will not be found excessive, while it may serve to emphasise more effectively the central ideas by which I have been guided throughout, particularly as regards the poetical value of the Greek poets, and the way in which Greek poetry, as poetry, may best be read so as to disengage its living virtue. Like the lectures on English poets already published last year under the title of The Springs of Helicon ^ this volume deals with one chapter in the larger and more comprehensive study of the Progress of Poetry. That X INTRODUCTION study regards poetry, from first to last and in all its contemporary or successive incarnations, as a continuous function of life, of which it is at once an interpretation and a pattern. The pattern of life set before the world by Greece, the interpretation of life given by the Greek genius, are of unique value. To Greek poetry we owe our most vital knowledge of both, and in it both are most essentially and intimately embodied. It therefore requires, as it repays, the largest and most delicate appreciation. What I have tried to do in these lectures is to disengage its essence. By regarding it as it is concentrated in the work of a few great poets, I have sought to place its progress in a clearer perspective, and to bring it into a closer relation to life. To do this, on whatever scale, implies an amount of concentration and rejection which lays a heavy strain on a writer. His task is not on the one hand that of a historian of Greek literature, who sets out to give an account of the whole poetical product of Hellas so far as that is extant or recorded. Such a task is larger ; it involves for its satisfactory performance not only wide and minute knowledge, but equally high gifts of insight, judgment, and proportion. Yet it is in a way easier, because its scope is defined ; the problems are those of arrangement and handling rather than those of organic reconstruction. Nor on the other hand is the task that of a philosophic enquirer, " moving among ideas " and handling large abstractions. For there is no such thing as poetry in the abstract; and the study of poetry, while it deals with a continuous movement of the creative and interpretative imagination as applied to INTRODUCTION xi life, is only real in so far as it is a study of actual poems, and is only vital in so far as it keeps close to the great poets, to poetry at its highest power. To attain its object, it must not treat poetry either as a mere matter of history or as a kind of imperfectly expressed philosophy. It must regard and handle it as an interpretation and pattern of life. In The Springs of Helicon, I dealt with the progress of poetry in England as, in the course of its evolution, it took shape in the work of three great poets, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. In these three poets, at long intervals, the movement of poetry became as it were visible and incarnate. Each absorbed into himself, and communicated to his own age, and to us, the effective integrated meaning of poetry as it had then been reached. The rest of English poetry, during the three centuries in question, places itself in relation to them. They supply key-notes, points of arrival and points of departure, for the whole of English poetry regarded as a continuous, progressive, and organic evolution. This volume of lectures proceeds on a somewhat analogous method. It does not on the one hand make any attempt to give a general history of Greek poetry, or any complete review of the work of the Greek poets ; nor on the other hand does it deal with its subject by abstraction and generalisation; and it treats of the poetical movement which was part of the life, and is still part of the vitalising force of Hellenism, mainly as that movement was embodied or manifested in the work of single poets. In Greek poetry, as in the history of the Hellenic xii INTRODUCTION civilisation itself, there are four main epochs. There is in the first place the mediaeval age, pre-Hellenic rather than actually Greek. Out of it the Greek world was born, and we know it as it reaches us through Greece. It is represented in poetry by the Iliad and Odyssey, the Hellenised Homer of a Homerised Hellas. The Homeric epic gives the pattern and interpretation of the life of that mediaeval world, as it took shape in the poetic imagination when it had already assumed the enchantment of distance, but still remained in some sense actual and alive. There is, next, the age of the creation of Hellas — of the purely Hellenic life, thought, art — interpreted in the terms of poetry by the lyrists of the seventh and sixth centuries. There is the age of Athens, the full Hellenic midday. Finally, there is the collapse of Hellenic life, and its reconstitution in new forms in a world saturated with Hellenism ; and, in that age, the reconstitution of poetry among the Alexandrians before its central life passed from them to Rome and the West. Greek poetry did not then cease to exist; it continued a fitful vitality for many generations, and even as late as the tenth century of our era its faint notes may still be heard. But as an interpretative function of life it may be regarded as having completed its orbit by the time when the fresh Latin genius took up the torch from its weakened hands. In the lectures on Homer which make up the first section of this volume, I have first given such a brief statement of what is known as the Homeric Question as was necessary in order to indicate, in its general INTRODUCTION xiii lines, the view taken of the actual origin and nature of the Homeric epics. This was necessary to clear the ground for what follows, which is an essay towards the appreciation of the Iliad and Odyssey themselves poetically, simply as poems of the first rank. In dealing with the lyric age, I have concentrated atten- tion on two poets : on Sappho as the greatest and most fully representative poet of the earlier lyric period, the age of freedom and expansion ; and on Simonides as embodying the matured perfection of the lyric just at the moment when poetry was preparing to transmute itself into new forms, and pass under the ascendancy of Athens. The central Athenian period, the age in poetry of the four great dramatists, is one which has been handled by modern critics and scholars with equal copiousness and ability. Its position may almost be taken for granted. Any history of Greek poetry, any work which purported to be a full study of the Greek poets, would necessarily deal with the Athenian dramatists as on the first plane of the canvas. It may seem strange that any volume of lectures on Greek poetry should omit Aeschylus and Euripides. But, for my own specific purpose, I have passed over both them and Aristophanes, as in The Springs of Helicon I passed over Shakespeare and the whole Elizabethan drama. To deal with them perfunctorily would be useless ; to deal with them ade- quately would throw the whole scheme of the volume out of scale. But just as in the fifth century before Christ the whole life of Greek poetry was concentrated in Athens, so in Athenian poetry the specific Athenian xiv INTRODUCTION achievement is to be found not in these other poets, but in Sophocles. The concentration of poetry has to be met by concentration of criticism. In a single lecture on Sophocles I have attempted to indicate, however slightly, the quality and value of his poetry as the full embodiment of the Athenian genius, just as Athens herself was the central embodiment of the genius of Hellenism. .Greek poetry, or such of it as is Greek in the full sense, is poetry after Homer; it is the poetry of a world in which, and for which, Homer effectively existed as a dominant influence. Even more fully we may say that the remainder of Greek poetry, from the year 406 B.C. onwards, is poetry after Athens. The main movement of this post-Athenian poetry took shape, after a long period of disintegration and diffusion, in the circle where the central figure, so far as there is any central figure, is that of Callimachus. Of this movement towards the reconstitution of poetry I have given a sketch in a lecture on the Alexandrians ; and this is followed by studies of the two Alexandrian poets, Theocritus and ApoUonius, in whom we may see most clearly the last interpretation of life effected by the Greek genius, and the premonitions of a new poetical world. The position of Greek as a factor in culture has never been more assured than it is now. It moves beyond reach of the attacks of those who fancy them- selves its opponents, and the alarmed outcries of those who profess themselves its only friends. It requires no elaborate system of artificial protection : it has INTRODUCTION xv become, in its own living virtue, part of our inherit- ance. Its study has increased and is increasing, both in width and in depth. It has ceased to rest on indolent tradition, or to be regarded as the appanage of a social class. It exercises over the whole modern world an influence astonishingly potent and per- vasive. That influence is all the greater because it is no longer for us the expression of another world which, however fascinating, is yet remote from our own, but of a world brought by the expansion, liberation, and co-ordination of knowledge into close touch with the thought and art, the life and conduct, of the present day. The danger now is, not of Greek being studied too little, but of its study being on the one hand pursued too hastily and carelessly, and, on the other hand, distorted under the pressure of a specialisa- tion which continually becomes more exacting in its demands. Against both dangers the safeguard is to be found in Greek poetry: for poetry will not be read carelessly ; and it goes straight to the heart of life. The aim of poetical criticism is to come nearer and nearer towards full appreciation, towards disengaging the essence of poetry. Attainment can at the best be only approximate : the horizon retreats before us. But it is just this which makes further advance always possible. The last word on poetry, or on any poet or poem, can never be said. If it were, we should have mastered the secret of life. But the next word is always waiting for some one to say it. Our last word on poetry cannot be said; nor can our first discovery of poetry ever ^be remade. Yet it xvi INTRODUCTION is just in so far as we can get near this double im- possibility that the poets will bear to us their full meaning. Now and then at least, if we read poetry as it should be read, the reward will come, it may be with some great poem, it may be only with some passage or phrase, of entering fully and freshly into it, as though we read it for the first time and as though it gave the meaning of life. It is in such moments, " solemn and rare," that poetry performs its function for us — or rather, that we perform our function for poetry : To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, ' Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. To attain these moments, no labour is wasted. To communicate them is the glory of the poets. To help towards their communication is the highest privilege, in their subsidiary province, of the exponents of poetry. For criticism is, or ought to be, the interpretation of poetry in some such sense as poetry is itself the interpretation of life. Such interpretation is difficult ; and nowhere more difficult than with those poets who have for many centuries been the schoolbooks of the civilised world, whose poetry only strikes home on us through thick layers of tradition, through the refracting medium of formal scholarship, through the distortion of what must always be imperfect understanding, not least so where we do not even know enough to realise the amount and kind of its imperfection. As we can only learn INTRODUCTION xvii life by actually living, so we can only appreciate poetry by actually reading it ourselves, with our own eyes and our own imaginative effort ; by our own appreciation, not by that of others. Attingenda incerta ingeniis facta, alia vero ita multis prodita ut in fastidium sint addtwta. Much poetry is only obscured by the ingenuities of criticism : much ancient poetry — and indeed much modern poetry also — comes to us so overlaid by com- ment that its life can hardly strike through to ours. Any one who attempts a new interpretation, a fresh appreciation of it, must feel anxious lest he may be only standing between the poetry and the reader. And this is quite apart from the difficulties of his task as regards himself and his own appreciation. Bes ardua, vetustis Twvitatem dare, novis aiwtoritatem, ohsoletis nitorem, ohscuris lucem, fastiditis gratiam, duhiis fidem, omnibus vero naturam, et naturae suae omnia. But the difficulty of the task does not make it less necessary. Such at least is the judgment of the University which, alone among those of the modern world, possesses and maintains a Chair of Poetry. HOMER THE HOMERIC QUESTION The Homeric question has been with us for more than a century, and while it has exercised and stimulated scholarship, it has also to some extent obscured Homer. For behind the Homeric question, and visible now only with some difficulty through the dust of controversy, lie the two things which really matter, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nearly half a century has passed since Arnold, in his famous lectures on translating Homer, made a serious attempt to estimate the nature and the quality of the Iliad and the Odyssey as poetry. In such estimates there is no finality. Each age must make them anew for itself; but the time has now come when this attempt may at least be repeated in the light of a vast access of experience. During the last generation our knowledge of the ancient world, our methods of in- vestigation, our armament of criticism, have all under- gone immense expansion. We have reached a point at which it becomes possible to look about us, to sum up the results so far attained, and to set down certain things as either fixed or probable. Within the last few years, in particular, these results seem to have been clarifying and co-ordinating themselves. The work of specialists is being passed on to those who can use it 4 HOMER critically and constructively. We still await some one to bring it together and vivify it, to give us back our Homer, enriched, understood, restored. This has still to be done ; and it will be done, we may hope with some confidence, within this or the next generation. The premonitions are too numerous to be ignored, too weighty to be neglected. My object for the present is partly to summarise, partly to anti- cipate. This is an almost necessary preliminary to any attempt at an appreciation of Homer. Without some indication of a point of view on the Homeric question, any discussion of Homer as poetry must be subject to ambiguities and misunderstandings. In doing this I merely propose to give a sketch or a suggestion of the position as it appears to me to stand now ; to ofifer what seem to me results, without the processes by which they are reached, without proof or argument. This in any case is all that the occasion allows ; and it is my apology for anything which follows that might seem, without this explanation, to be dogmatic. I shall be satisfied if I can suggest lines of thought, to be filled up or corrected by my readers from their own knowledge, and according to their own literary or historical, and above all according to their own poetical instinct. Much of what the modern Homeridae are concerned with does not enter into the scope of this sketch at all. I pass over their schemes and systems, some because they are already obsolete, others because they are for the present purpose irrelevant. I make no attempt to trace their history or to indicate the successive phases through which they have passed: THE BEGINNINGS OF GREECE 5 nor do I point the moral which forces itself on any one who casts his eye over that row of extinct theories, each once in its own time alive. They took colour, they drew their force and persuasiveness, from one or another master- theory prevalent, and accepted con- sciously or unconsciously, at the time ; from some plau- sible " key to all poetries." It fed them with blood ; as it ceased to do so, they also in turn faded back into bloodless ghosts, vckvcov aimevrjva Kaprjva. My object is now to consider the Iliad and Odyssey simply as two consummate achievements in poetry, from the point of view of one who considers^oetry itself as a function, interpretation, and pattern of life. V And as a pre- liminary to this consideration, it is essential, first, to regard the way in which Homer — using that word in its ordinary sense — came to be : and then, in the light of this process, to regard the effect of Homer on the genius and life of the Hellenic civilisation, and of the Hellenic civilisation on Homer. Eor Homer was before Hellas : yet Hellas gave us Homer. In history, nothing begins and nothing ends: and it is not possible to assign any precise date to the birth of the Greek race or the Greek genius. They emerge from obscurity in 'a period of which we know little, and are not likely to know much more. For the knowledge that would be useful to us is not such as can be derived to any large extent from archaeologi- cal discoveries. These may often supplement, may sometimes suggest, but cannot create the substance of what it would be to our purpose to know. In sum, however, the main facts seem to stand somewhat thus. 6 HOMER Some time about 1100 B.C. the movement of peoples began which goes in ancient records by the name of the Dorian invasion. It broke into, and broke up, a mediaeval civilisation in the region afterwards known as Greece : that mediaeval, Homeric, or " Mycenaean " civilisation having itself succeeded, perhaps at a long interval, a still earlier and still more imposing civilisa- tion of which the remains have yielded themselves to explorers in Crete. But that was a long, slow process ; the Middle Ages, then as once again in Western Europe, died hard, or did not wholly die at all; they changed their life. For a full century — say from 1050 to 950 B.C. (such dates are mere convenient symbols) — there was a great tide of migration and expansion. The old Achaean settlements were broken up. The Asiatic coast was colonised from Europe. The loosely knit texture of the Achaean communities slowly transformed itself into a system of more definite monarchies and aristocracies. Beneath these, there began the first stirrings of self-conscious life among the people. The changes were not only material and external; they were not even only political or social. They were changes in the soul of man. The human mind took an advance of momentous import- ance; it gained a step which it has never since wholly lost. That step was the disengagement of the creative intelligence. Thought began ; and with thought came the instrument of thought, letters. The alphabet was in general use by the end of the century of migrations ; with the adoption of the alphabet, both as cause and effect, came the THE MEDIAEVAL INHERITANCE 7 beginnings of Greek litoature, and we may say^„of Greek life.'. The new age inherited a rich tradition of story and song from the mediaeval life out of which it had risen. When, reaching comparative settlement after a century of confusion and dislocation, it found in itself both the leisure and the capacity for art, it turned to those old inherited stories as to a world which had already taken on the enchantment of distance. The old Achaean, pre-Dorian world, still more or less familiar in its ways of life, as in its language and its dwelling- places, became idealised into an epic age. It was so idealised alike by its own descendants and by the Northern immigrants or conquerors who had mingled with them in blood and speech. This was so more especially on the Asiatic coast, where the fusion of the races was most complete. To these colonists, of what- ever blood, came the appeal of a half-legendary past, with an o verier dship of Argos and great deeds of a confederacy of princes. It came home to them all, as that of Arthur the Briton, of the Kingdom of Logres, and the feats of the Round Table, came home to English, Normans, and French, no less than to Britons, on both sides of the English Channel. The analogy is fertile in many ways; most strikingly of all in the way in which both these bodies of epic romance ignore history, ignore differences of race and severance of language, ignore even the cataclysms which separated that actual or imagined past from the present. We do not, for instance, look for, and we do not find, in the Arthurian literature any 8 HOMER allusion to the Norman conquest of Great Britain. The literature and its whole environment are shut off from the world of the twelfth century, and from what lay historically behind that world, by an absolute barrier. There is no hint, no idea, that the mediaeval world had somehow been made, whether by slow changes or by violent shocks, out of the heroic Ar- thurian world ; the question how the one thing was made out of the other does not even arise. So also it is with Homer. In both cases, too, the seed-ground of the new poetry is in a grouping of countries round a central sea ; and that sea is not only a highway of commerce and migration, but the fluid medium (one might say) through which the movements of the human mind spread and communicated themselves so easily and so rapidly that they seem to arise simultaneously and independently in many different quarters. This is the important truth latent in a fertile remark of Coleridge's preserved by Scott: in Homer "there was, he said, the individuality of an age, but not of a country." ^ Thus Achaean lays, traditionally transmitted, be- came the basis for both court and popular poetry. By 900 B.C., or thereabouts, we are in the age of the epic lays, the K\ea avSpwp. In both Iliad and Odyssey these earlier epic lays or chansons de geste have left unmistakable traces of their existence, and less cer- tainly recoverable indications, now and then, of their actual form. The material of portions of the Iliad seems to have taken definite poetical shape on the * Journal, under date 22nd April 1828. THE EPIC LAYS 9 mainland of Greece, in Thessaly or in Boeotia, at an early period in the century of the migrations — prob- ably while the Peloponnesus was still Achaean. But all this is guess-work : the elaborate inverted pyramids of reconstruction that have been successively built up by theorising scholars go down at a touch. In the hands of their most brilliant exponents they seem to take shape for a moment, then dissolve and stream away into the mist out of which they rose. The epic lays were freely used by later poets ; in some instances they were even, no doubt, incorporated en bloc, with but little change, in the new and larger structure. So far as they were already apt, they would not require readaptation. But the search after a primary Iliad and a primary Odyssey is in the main futile ; so far as it is not, it is of little relevance. It is due to a deep-seated confusion between two things — a poem, and a story or stories — many of them already the subject of skilled poetical treatment — on which the poem was founded. " It is to the poet of the primary Iliad," says Jebb, "if to any one, that the name of Homer belongs." That sentence puts the fallacy in a succinct form. The answer to it is that there was no primary Iliad. So also, the saga which was the origin of the Odyssey probably took shape in Greece Proper before the migrations, or at least before its own migration; and that shape was poetry, though it was not Homeric poetry. It was not the " original Odyssey," any more than the saga summarised in Saxo Grammaticus is the original Hamlet. The argument against the unity of either 10 HOMER Iliad or Odyssey is in effect that which may be urged against the unity of any vital organism — Thou art not thyself, For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains That issue out of dust.^ The statement so often made, that " at least two poets have wrought" on this or that portion of the Iliad, generally amounts to no more than this, that the poet has there used at least two stories, at least two bodies of material, which lay before him in the work of two, or it may be of twenty, earlier poets. By the beginning of the ninth century B.C. the epic lays, the KXea apSpwp, had become a whole body of literature, in the full sense of that term. For them a literary vehicle, the | Aeolian or mixed language, had been evolved and brought to high perfection; a metrical form of unsurpassed flexibility and beauty, the heroic hexameter, had been wrought out; their overwhelming vogue had, so far as can be judged, eclipsed all other poetical forms and subjects. The potentialities of epic poetry were created; the time was ripe for the great epic poet. Then the great epic poet came. Somewhere on the J Ionian coast or among the adjacent islands, in a sky sown thick with dust of stars, a great planet rose. Homer conceived and executed the Iliad. That Iliad, in its main substance and its essential form, is the Iliad which we possess now. It passed through many vicissitudes. It suffered, as we shall see presently, one long eclipse or submergence. It * Measure for Measure, iii. 1. THE CANONICAL HOMER 11 received accretions of substance, some of which prob- ably are, some certainly are not, from the hand of its original author. Its dialectical forms were modified : in details it was retouched and modernised. But it remained the same poem. The canonical Iliad issued as an Authorised Version at Athens in the sixth century B.C., which is to all intents and purposes our ^ Iliad, is also to all intents and purposes the original and only Iliad, the work of Homer. V\, About a generation — it may be as much as two generations — after the Iliad, the same poetical move- ment, the same quality of poetical genius, taking a fresh advance, produced the Odyssey. Speaking poeti- cally, as a matter of art, the Odyssey implies the Iliad throughout. It is a work of lower poetical splendour * but of higher technical skill. In this matter of technical skill the author of the Odyssey set himself, as it were, deliberately to excel the Iliad. The general tradition accepted through Greece later was that the poems were by the same poet, but separated by a con- siderable interval of years. This view is rejected by the overwhelming majority of modern scholars, but it cannot be said to be impossible. Even if we hold without hesitation that the Iliad and the Odyssey are by different poets — and it seems to me difficult to hold this without a good deal of hesitation — many of the arguments by which that view has been supported are either misstatements or irrelevances. Tests must be applied to criticism as much as to things criticised, and under these tests much of the destructive criti- cism of Homer loses its edge, much of the hypothetical 12 HOMER reconstruction crumbles away. We must apply, here as elsewhere, the comparative method. There is no precise analogy ; but the poet who produced the Iliad in the early prime of his life was, as one may put it, a poet capable of the artistic and poetical change which is felt in the Odyssey, among new surroundings, with an altered view of life, with an imaginative ardour burning less strongly, and with increased constructional mastery. As a masterpiece of construction the Odyssey is unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled in poetry. The tradition that it was the work of the advanced age of the poet of the Iliad is also in singular consonance with the fact that in the last books there may clearly be traced either a different or a failing hand. The last 624 lines were rejected by Alexandrian critics as a late addition. But there is more than that. Up to the nineteenth book the construction is masterly and the certainty of hand complete. From that point on to the end the constructive power flags ; the workmanship becomes here and there hasty, unfinished, or uncertain. Whether this is due to failing powers in an aging poet, or to his death (as was the case with Virgil and the Aeneid) before he had finished his work, is mere conjecture; the author of the Odyssey may have finished (as Shakespeare does sometimes, and Scott habitually) in a hurry, or a pupil may have worked over and pieced out the master's unfinished conclusion. But in no case is the substantial unity of the Odyssey as a work of art affected. ^ Internal evidence, Jebb thought, was conclusive as to the workings of a different mind in the Iliad THE DIFFERENT MIND 13 and Odyssey. A different mind may however come to a poet with the lapse of years and with fresh experiences. Analogies are slippery. But if we turn to the most Homeric of English poets, we shall find a different mind in the Life and Death of Jason and in the Story of Sigurd the Volsung. If we turn to Milton, we shall find, even at the interval of but a few years, the workings of a different mind in the Paradise Lost and the Paradise Regained, in form, technique, and sub- stance. We shall find .in the Paradise Regained an analogous lessening of tension, an analogous shrinkage of similes, a different way (as is said of the Odyssey in contrast with the Iliad) of thinking of the Gods. We shall find that the vocabulary and syntax show marked changes. These changes are not only formal, but substantial. One instance will be sufficient to show what is meant as regards vocabulary. In the Paradise Losty the " glass of Galileo," or the astronomer's " glaz'd optick tube " as it is called elsewhere, is referred to in terms which indicate it as something strange, unique, almost magical. In the Paradise Regained, the tele- scope and the microscope are spoken of by their ordinary names and quite as a matter of course. Were the methods of much Homeric criticism applied to Milton, this would be one of the facts cited to prove that the Paradise Regained belonged to a later cultural epoch than that of the Paradise Lost, Had the two poems reached us as the sole relics of a submerged world, subjected to all the subtle effects of changing dialect, of long transmission through imper- fect manuscripts, of dispersion and re-collection, it 14 HOMER would not be beyond the power of scholars to make out a plausible case both for a primary or " original " Paradise Lost and for the attribution of Paradise Regained to a different author belonging to a later generation. So it is, too, with the Aeneid. With it we know the facts for certain. Virgil wrought up into it masses of older material ; he left it incomplete at his death, full of variant readings, unfinished passages, unplaced episodes. It had to be arranged and edited by his executors. They did their work conscientiously and admirably ; in particular, they scrupulously refrained from adding even a word anywhere. But even so, had the Aeneid reached us without any collateral or external evidence as to the circumstances of its composition, did we possess it as the earliest known product of Graeco-Roman poetry, reaching us out of an unknown world, rising like an island out of unplumbed seas, it would be easy to trace in it the work of different hands. There would almost certainly have been some plausible theory of a primary Aeneid, and of its ex- pansion by successive insertions. At least three poets, other than the poet of the Italian epic which was the " original " or " primary " Aeneid, would have been confidently named as responsible for the third, fourth, and sixth books, besides a fourth who worked them over to make them fit into the poem as it took final shape. Whole passages would have been obelised. An earlier theory that it was made up by the skilful piecing together of a series of short poems would have been succeeded by a theory that an THE DECADENCE 15 original core, to which large accretions had been made, had been wholly re-edited and re-shaped, and that the name of Virgil belonged, if to any one, to the author of the primary or Italian Aeneid. By the end of the ninth century B.C. the Iliad and Odyssey existed: but Hellas did not yet exist. A century or^more followed, the whole history of which is plunged in darkness. In literature, it is represented by the lost epics of the Cycle. Like the Chaucerians in England, the Cyclic poets carried on the Homeric tradition with continually dwindling powers: the record in both cases is one of swift decadence and growing incompetence; in both cases the last feeble efforts overlap the birth of a new poetry. A modern theory, urged with much learning and by some at least of its supporters with plausible persuasiveness, makes tradition invert the order of facts. It makes the Cycle consist of a mass of pre-Homeric epics. It represents it as the material out of which the Iliad and Odyssey were refined by a nobler morality and a more developed artistic sense. But the debase- ment of a style does not precede its culmination. As a matter of art, no less than as a matter of substance, the Cyclic epics imply Homer. They fell back, no doubt, on motives which Homer had deliberately re- jected. This is what all decadent schools do, and reversion is inseparable from evolution. But no solid proof, no probability which commends itself as such to a trained poetical instinct, has been advanced against the consent of all tradition, that their object was to supplement Homer, that their method was to imitate 16 HOMER him, and that where they struck out on a line of their own, they lacked the genius to succeed in it. The Cypria, written as an introduction to the Iliad, the • Aethiopis, Iliupersis, and Nostoi, written to fill up the space between the IHad and Odyssey, are dated early in the eighth century B.C. The stream of epic flows i on from them in a fainter and fainter trickle, not ; wholly disappearing until the middle of the sixth I century. Meanwhile, Hellas had been born. In the dim records of the eighth century we can just trace the outlines of a life which was still pre- Hellenic, but which held in it the germ of Hellenism. The old kingdoms have mostly disappeared. Sybaris and Miletus are the two wealthiest and largest cities in the Greek world. Sparta and Athens are becoming important powers in Greece Proper. The afterglow of the mediaeval world, which had produced the age of the epic, had faded out ; and on the eastern horizon appears, pale and clear, the dawn of a new day. The earliest of the Greek lyrists, in whom the voice of Hellas first manifests itself, do not go back much beyond 700 b.c. Already by that time the memory of the Homeric poems had become faint. The Iliad and Odyssey, like two great mountain peaks, had retreated and become hidden behind the foot-hills of the Cycle. The life which they re-created and inter- preted was very dim and remote. It is probable that their dialectical forms, and even to some extent their vocabulary, had become difficult. The new poetry, the poetry of Hellas, rose independently of them, except in so far as it was a distinct reaction from THE RE-EMERGENCE 17 them, and except in so far as they had created a literary language which to a great extent remained that of the whole Greek world. The Greek genius had set itself to the two great creations which it in- troduced into the world and over which it spent its whole life — the creation of the state and the creation of the individual. The epic minstrels dwindled into court poets and became obsolete. For all the lyrists of the seventh and the earlier half of the sixth century, Homer might not have existed ; we do not feel Homer in them. In the sixth century begins the age of the de- ''^X-nxX^-xJ mocracies. It is then that Homer reappears. As the '^(>-h^-i world travelled on, the foot-hills sank away, and in 6 ^\ the broadening daylight the two great mountain peaks once more swam into the ken of Hellas. Homer had been brought to Sparta from Crete, we are told, nearly . a century before lyric poetry was brought to Sparta direct by Tyrtaeus and Alcman. But, if so, he had not remained there as a vital influence — he had not struck root. The recitation of Homer was stopped, we are told again, at Sicyon by Cleisthenes about 600 B.C. Whatever this means, it means that Homer was no vital element in the life of Sicyon : it was like Jus- tinian's closure of the Schools of Athens. The re- emergence of Homer, the launching of the Iliad and Odyssey upon the main current of Greek life, took place later. It took place at Athens in the time of Peisistratus. What Athens did for Homer, and what Homer did for Athens, we cannot say precisely ; but we can say this largely, th at Homer was the gift of B 18 HOMER Athens, and Athens the gift,.of_Jiomer, to Hellas and to the whole world. In an age of few written texts and no exact scholar- ship, the Iliad and Odyssey had only survived, as it were, by a series of miracles. There had been much interpolation, much confusion, much cutting up ; but the organic unity and organic life of the poems were so complete and so powerful that they had come through substantially intact. The text of the Odyssey, the various texts of the Iliad, which were collected by the enthusiasm and industry of Athenian scholars, enabled them to reinstate and give universal currency to an Iliad and Odyssey which were in substance the authentic Homer. The term I have just used must be more closely defined if it is not to be misunderstood. The authentic Homer was not a fixed text. This is no paradox ; it only seems paradoxical because we are so accustomed to poems which have assumed a fixed text — before, the invention of printing as well as after — from the moment of publication. But when reading and writing were arts laboriously exercised and confined to. a small number of skilled experts, there was no such thing as publication. A poet then retained his poem . more in his own possession ; he did more freely, more as a matter of course, what it is his natural tendency to do — remodelled, retouched, recast, rearranged, re- worded, what still remained fluid and plastic in his. hands. If he chose, this process only ended with his life. Even after that, it went on among those into- whose hands the poem passed, so far as they were THE ATHENIAN TEXT 19 not restrained by reverence for the text as they had received it. In the Odyssey, with its close-knit and masterly construction, little was likely to be done ; even the conclusion, with all its imperfections, was accepted as it stood. The larger and more elastic scheme of the Iliad had admitted more variation and inter- polation; it had paid the price also of its wider diifusion and its greater popularity. The work of the Athenian editors was clearly done with great judgment and with great conservatism. They may have carried further the lonisation of the language which had been insensibly proceeding in the course of previous transmission. They were accused of having interpolated one or two lines; we can hardly doubt that they removed a considerable amount of accretions which had found their way into one or another of the texts which were before them. But they retained the Doloneia, which even according to the old tradition was a separate epic lay, written by the author of the Iliad, but not a part of the Iliad. They retained the additions, clearly post-Homeric, which had found their way into the account of the funeral games : they re- tained the so-called Little Aeneid of the twentieth book, which has all the appearance of an insertion that never became fully assimilated. But it is impos- sible to credit a late tradition that the Doloneia had not been inserted into the Iliad until then, and that, in the words of Eustathius, " Peisistratus added it." There is a vital difference, as all the mem- bers of the Society for the Protection of Ancient m HOMER Buildings are aware, between adding and refraining from removing an addition. Aristarchus at a later period obelised certain passages without removing them ; that was a further refinement of editing. But what they left unremoved, the Athenian editors did not add, any more than Aristarchus added what he did not obelise. For the words " Peisistratus added this," we ought to substitute, " The Peisistratean editors found and accepted this addition." Their work in main substance and effect was a reconstitution, to the best of their power, of the authentic Homer ; and this was the Homer that they gave to Hellas and to future ages. When, three hundred years later, a fresh revision of the Iliad and Odyssey was made, the Alexandrian scholars did not, because they could not, go back behind the Athenian version. It was the Hellenic Homer. It issued from Athens, because Athens was already becoming the central focus of Hellenic art and life. But Athens became that, in great measure, through the Athenian capacity for appreciating Homer. If Athens in a sense made our Homer, Homer likewise in a sense made our Athens. Homer, says Plato in the Republic^ has educated Greece — Treiral^evKev 'EXXac^a. Athens, we may remember, had herself been called by Pericles the TralSevarig 'EXXa^09, " the education of Greece." Both sayings are aspects of the same truth. Athens Hellenised Homer, and Homer through Athens moulded Hellas. The effect of the re-emergence and dominance of Homer on the literature and life of the whole Greek HOMER AND HELLAS 21 world was swift and profound. From 500 B.C., or some years earlier, the whole of Greek literature implies Homer, is founded on Homer, is in organic connection with Homer throughout. Those great twin peaks dominate the whole landscape ; their slopes feed the plains and cities of men with the produce of a hundred forests, the soil and water brought down by a thousand streams. The earlier Greek lyric, the flower of an age in which Homer was half forgotten, faded away or became transformed. The' Attic drama was the creation of a Homerised Hellas with its Hellenised Homer. So, in varying measure, was the whole of classical Greek literature : not only the dramatists, not only the poets, but the orators, the historians, the philosophers. Thus the touch of Homer upon Hellas had some- thing of the same awakening and vivifying effect that the touch of Hellas has had, again and again, on oth^r countries and later ages. The movement of the sixth/ century B.C., which brought Homer fully into the life of Hellas, was the first Renaissance. In the course of that movement the Homeric and the Hellenic genius were incorporated and became indissolubly one. Jointly they created what we mean by Greece ; they created ideals towards which the human race has ever since turned its eyes. In that temple of the human spirit are ranged the Greek classics, the bronze and marble of fully developed Greek thought and art. Behind them the Iliad and Odyssey stand in the dusk of the inner sanctuary, like two statues in the ivory and gold of an earlier world. We measure and analyse them, we examine their chips and flaws, their rubbings 22 HOMER and recolourings ; we conjecture the elements out of which they grew, we try our best to reconstitute the world in which they were born ; we please ourselves by tracing in them the work of successive hands and the accretions of successive ages. The Homeric question is always with us. But so is Homer ; and to Homer we may now turn. II HOMER AND THE ILIAD Homer is but a name : and the Homeric poems, like the plays of Shakespeare, while they create a world, hardly reveal a personality. The Iliad and the Odyssey as they have descended to us show in each case the hand of a single great poet. But who that poet was, or when he lived, or how far he incorporated and how far he transmuted the work of his predecessors, we can only guess. Critical analysis and imaginative divina- tion alike fail us when we come to the heart of the question. Still less can we form any notion of the poet's mind, of his own attitude towards the actual world in which he lived, or even towards the magical world which he presents to us. In both cases the personal note is as completely absent as it can possibly be from any piece of human workmanship. We seem to be looking on the work of some impersonal force, a Deus absconditus. Shakespeare is so near our own time that we can almost reach back and touch him. We have his portrait, his signature, copies of his plays made in his own lifetime ; we know all about the society in which he lived. No great cataclysm, no period of centuries whose history is dependent almost wholly on tradi- 24 HOMER tion or inference, separates him from us. A modem historian has not to say of him, as Herodotus says of Homer, " In my opinion he lived not more than four hundred years ago," and leave the subject there. We have records of his life, his christening and burial, his purchases and bequests, scraps of his conversation, a few rather coarse anecdotes. They all tell us nothing. When we say Shakespeare we mean the plays. But the plays answer none of our questions about their author. They are a mirror, and a mirror that has the strange power of making its own images : but it is nowhere transparent. Even his part in the plays is very uncertain. How much part had he in Henry VI., in Titus Andronicus, in Timon of Athens ? How far have any of the plays reached us as he wrote them ? In Henry VIII., and in several other plays, we have intricate and perhaps insoluble problems of mixed authorship: we can hardly be sure that we possess fully Shakespeare's own Hamlet, we can be almost sure that we do not possess fully Shakespeare's own Macbeth. And if this be true of his plays externally, it is still more true of them as revelations of a person. They do not tell us clearly, if they tell us at all, what he thought about life, the world, mankind. Except for merely external and formal allusions, neither the religious beliefs nor the religious controversies of his time might have existed for him. The contemptuous tone towards democracy which has been traced as a recurrent note in the plays is merely dramatic, and may be wholly artificial. For the actual Shakespeare, we have the key of the Sonnets — if we were sure how HOMER AND SHAKESPEARE 25 to fit it into the lock — and we have Shakespeare's women. But the Iliad and Odyssey rise before us, as they rose before the awakening consciousness of Hellas two thousand five hundred years ago, like islands out of an unplumbed sea. From that same sea, long afterwards, through stages of which we can, with the modern armament of scholarship, dimly trace the rough outline, rose what we know as Greece, the Hellenic art, thought, life. The Iliad and Odyssey had, we may say con- fidently, assumed their form before then: before the Peisistratean recension, before the age of the earlier Greek lyric poets, before the beginning of authorised chronology. This assumption of form, which in the main issue made them what they are, was the work in each case of a certain poet of supreme genius. It is with the poems themselves, not with the material out of which they were shaped or the stages and processes of the shaping, that we have to do when we are considering poetry as a function of life. The earlier attempts to dissect either poem are now realised to have missed the main point. Later analysis, more skilful and better informed, has but little to do with the nature and progress of poetry. The Iliad and Odyssey are not rhapsodies in the obvious sense of that word, although they imply the work of rhapsodes. The complex product (this cannot be repeated too often) is analogous to a chemical rather than to a mechanical combination. But it is equally essential to remember that even the chemical analogy is far short of the truth. We have to do with life. Both 26 HOMER poems are vital organisms, and their growth was organic, whether we regard it as the slow age-long deposit of some coral forest under the sea, or as the bursting into flower, in a single lifetime, of what had been long maturing invisibly in root and stem and bud. In either case they are the final transformation in the life and growth of a poetry which must have been living and growing for generations. The old care- less view, due partly to ignorance and partly to mis- understanding of ambiguous terms, that they represent the birth of poetry in some fancied youth of the world, is as nearly as may be the reverse of the truth. They are not the birth of poetry ; they are its full maturity, just before, in that particular form, poetry ceased to live and to interpret life. And the same is true of all the greatest poetry, as it is true, even more widely, of all the greatest art. Poetry itself, art itself, is indeed immortal. But its progress passes from one to another manifestation. We speak locally of sunrise and sunset, but over the world as a whole the sun is always rising and always setting. And when art fulfils itself, it is on the point of passing on elsewhither, of dismissing its finished task and seeking a new world to conquer and transform. For the age and country in which they came into being, the Iliad and Odyssey represent not sunrise but sunset, though to us, further towards the darkening west, irori ^ocpov tjepoepra, they appear to be coloured with morning glories, to lie far off towards the sunrise and the dawn. In one of the most profound and illuminating of his literary criticisms, Aristotle observes of tragedy THE MATURED EPIC 27 that when, after passing through many phases, it had once fully realised itself, it stopped — eiravararo, cTrel eo-^e rrjv avrrj^ (pvoriv. In the Iliad and Odyssey, as they assumed their final form, the epic " attained its nature." Then it stopped: there was nothing more to be done. Except for inconsiderable and one might say merely verbal alterations, the epic had crystallised in its permanent structure. Lines might be inter- polated in a catalogue, or even a whole catalogue inserted; redundant passages might be added or re- moved ; a large amount of verbal variation was a matter of course in a long poem transmitted only in manuscript, still more in a long poem mainly trans- mitted through memory, and habitually recited in fragments. Such a poem is still half-fluid, and no two copies of it are exactly alike. The text of Chaucer, or of Fiers Plowman, shows us what can happen in such cases, and what is found to happen unless, as with the sacred books of the Jews, a literal sanctity was attached to the precise wording. It may be held as certain that the Athenian recension of the sixth century B.C. was no more than what it is reported to have been, a settlement of the text such as, three hundred years later, had to be made over again by Alexandrian scholars. The mere fact that it had to be made indicates in both cases that the poems them- selves had been long in existence, and that the amount of local variation in their text was becoming excessive. T'An analogous fallacy is the view, to which currency was given a century ago by the Romantic school, that 28 HOMER the Homeric poems are "natural," in antithesis to Virgil for instance, or to Milton, who are " artificial." So far from the Iliad and Odyssey being natural egjfis, they are artificial in a very special and eminent degree. Those two islands rising out of unplumbed seas hold the salvage of a submerged continent. They have crowded into them all, out of a vast volume of poetry, |that the Hellenic consciousness wished to save, or felt 'to be worth saving; or all, to put it in a different way, out of a dying world which refused to die, because >/it had in itself the energy of enduring life. It is in virtue of that immense energy that they are alive still. They contain dead matter, accidental accretions, or fragments of foreign bodies embedded in them without being fully assimilated ; and it is in these that we find the main clues, scanty enough indeed, to the history of their growth. Of their origins we know in fact next to nothing. The national p^^ry of early (^reece dealt, as early national poetry loves to deal, with a heroic period, compounded of history, imaginat^ ^on, and fa^ble. It did not begin to take shape in epics until that period, so far as it had ever existed, was long over : it did not take final shape until a time in which the events it deals with were ceasing to be credible. This shape was final, partly because it was so satisfying that it could not be bettered, partly because the impulse of re-shaping had become ex- hausted, and interest and imagination began to move along other channels. We stand with regard to the Iliad and Odyssey somewhat as we should stand to Malory's Mortc d' Arthur, if not only all Arthurian HELLAS AND HOMER 29 literature but all European literature previous to it had perished. Milton considered and rejected the Arthurian cycle for the subject of his epic. Far more impossible was it for Greek poets to melt up the Iliad and Odyssey and run them into new moulds. The epic had assumed stable equilibrium. The genius of poetry turned to the lyric, and the interest of poets to the new political life, the new individualism, the new thought, art, religion, which were beginning to stir throughout the Hellenic world. On the first page of his collection of the Greek lyric poets, Bergk placed, with admirable insight, a fragment of two lines preserved by Pausanias from the work of Eumelus of Corinth. He was reckoned a poet of the epic cycle ; and these lines are written in the Homeric hexameter; but in them the whole epic atmosphere has melted away. A new day has broken. Tw yap ^IdwixoLTa KaTaOujuLio^ cTrXeTO iS/Lotcra a KaOapav KiOapLV koI eXevOepa a-a/jL^aX e-^oicra, " For to him of Ithome the Muse is well-pleasing that has a pure harp and free sandals" — the words take us out of the charmed Homeric air into the keen chill and sharp shadowless daylight of the Greek dawn. This was three hundred years before Herodotus : yet it seems separated from Homer by a still greater chasm of thought and tone. The speech of Polydamas, in a passage which the critics call a late insertion, seems to show the epic illusion disappearing before the same new impulse of Hellenic thought. The ideal Homeric world has been tried and found unsatisfying; man- 30 HOMER kind had to begin again. "In nowise wilt thou be able to take everything on thyself," says Polydamas; " to one God gives the works of war for his portion, \o one the dance, to one viol and song ; but in the heart of another Zeus the Far-Sounder lays excellent understanding, whereof many of mankind get profit : yes, and he saves many, and himself best knows it." ^ aXX' otj 'TTcog djixa iravTa Suvi]creaL avrog eXea-Qai' oXXm fJLev yap eScoKC Oeog TroXejULrjia epya, aWw ^' 6p')(r](TTvv, €T€p(p KiOapiv KOI ololS^v ' otXXco <5' €V (TTtjOearG-L TiOel voov evpvoira Zievg ecrdXoVy Tov Se re ttoXXoI eiravpla-icovT avOpcoTroi, Kal T€ TToXetg €crd(jOG-€j juLaXiarTa Se Kavrog aveyvco. This, whether it be authentic Homer or not, is the full authentic voice of Greece. By all probable analogy, which bears out, here as elsewhere, the fundamental soundness of tradition when tradition is not misinterpreted in order to sup- port some irresponsible theory, the great poets from whose hands the Homeric epics were given to Greece and to the world lived just at the end of the times which were the Greek Middle Ages. Our habitual view of the Greek world as ancient partly blinds us to the fact that it was in all essentials intensely modern. They had had their Middle Ages, their centuries of feudalism, chivalry, romance, before the time when their recorded history and their extant literature (except so far as this is preserved in Homer) began. 1 II. xiii. 729-34. Mr. Leaf thinks 1. 731 a tasteless interpolation. As to the epithet, opinions may differ. THE NEW WORLD 31 /Out of that mediaeval world, breaking it up and re- placing it, there arose in Western Europe the nations^ round the Aegean ^ the city-states. There was an immense political upheaval, an immense expansion of colonisation and commerce ; and behind both, and going deeper, a great liberation of thought, a great passion of freedom. The Iliad and Odyssey are the Nimage which that modern world of Greece formed and kept of the mediaeval world that had preceded it. In this sense they are the first and one of the greatest achievements of the Greek genius ; they are compar- able to the work done, at the end of Greek life, by Aristotle. And just as Aristotle, at the time when the Greek city-state was perishing for ever, legislates for it in the Politics ; just as Dante, at the time when the mediaeval Empire lay stricken to death, lives in a dream of it so intense that it almost creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; so there is little trace in Homer of the new Gree k world. All three are completelj^ absorbed in the story and spectacle of a great past , with no pre vision of the future, hardly with any real appreciation of the present. ThjaJi«.pa8t was, as a matter of history, dead, if as a matter of history it had ever existed ; but to them it was living, and through them it is still living to us. The Icelandic genius, when it had perfected its epic, passed into romance. This seems a natural progress. It might, one fancies, have happened in Greece but for the invasion of new blood, life, and ideas — that is to say, but for all that we mean by Hellenism. As it was, the pure Greek mind was the least romantic of ^ 32 HOMER all in history. Hence perhaps the sudden and pro- found gap between Homer and the Greek poets. Some thirty years ago, Mr. Lang, in a fine sonnet, drew an imaginative analogy between Homer and the Nile. It is one full of suggestion. Out of trackless and apparently endless desert, the River descends into a land of which it is the highway and the life, which it fertilises and renders habitable. Its own life and growth are remote and unknown. Another modern poet has extended the analogy to poetry itself: — Or I am like a stream that flows Full of the cold springs that arose In morning lands, in distant hills ; And down the plain my channel fills With melting of forgotten snows. Modern exploration has tracked the Nile to its source and mapped out its channel and its tributaries. The hidden course of that other stream we cannot retrace ; it still issues in all its volume and splendour out of a land of mystery : nee licuit populis parvum te, Homere, videre. That from the whole mass of pre-Hellenic poetry all that has survived is jwhat was absorbed into the two epics of the Wrath of Achilles and the Return of Odysseus, is one of those things which for want of a better word we call accidental. Other episodes in the cycle of Troy offer equal scope for the poet. The return of Agamemnon supplied ample material for the greatest achievements of Attic tragedy, and the War of Troy after the Iliad became, still later, a treasure- house of subjects for romantic treatment. They are ^ THE PRECIOUS SHORE 33 not in themselves less suited for epic handling than the two episodes actually chosen ; and in point of fact the epic cycle dealt with them also, in the works attri- buted to Arctinus of Miletus, Lesches of Mitylene, Agias of Troezen. Nor was the epic confined to the Trojan cycle. From the Iliad itself it is clear that whole bodies of epic story quite apart from the tale of Troy were current, and had received the same large imaginative treatment: stories like those of Belle- rophon and of Nio^e, of the Quest of the Golden Fleece, of the Hunt of Calydon. But tliese two epi- sodes, as it happened, were chosen and dealt with by a greater poet, and received at his hands an intenser poetical life. Nature, as science reminds us, produces life at equivalent cost of death ; nee xdlam rem gigni patitur nisi morte adiuta aliena : and the strong life of the Iliad and Odyssey swept into itself whole bodies of poetry, not epic alone, that were consumed in the process. It is this that gives them their unique richness. They are crowded with the treasure of a thousand wrecks. Like the Precious Shore in the legend of Britomartis, the ground is — bestrewed all with rich array Of pearls and precious stones of great assay, And all the gravel mixt with golden ore. Shortly upon that shore there heaped was Exceeding riches, and all precious things. The spoil of all the world ; that it did pass The wealth of th' East and pomp of Persian kings. y I spoke of Shakespeare's women as one of the two keys we possess to the real Shakespeare. Homer's 34 HOMER women are likewise remarkable ; yet one has the feel- ing throughout that they are only fragments, sparingly used and jealously scrutinised, of a lost world of poetry that may have held figures as great as those of Gudrun and Brynhild, of Imogen or Cleopatra. In the Iliad and Odyssey there are only two women in the foremost plane of the action, Andromache and Penelope. Both are vivid and actual, as fully alive as the men among whom they move ; yet in both it seems as if the poet made them live almost against his will, or against the will of his audience ; as though he would rather have given, or they would rather have had given them, generalised portraits of the faithful wife and affectionate mother. The recognition of Odysseus by Penelope might have been treated with the same power and tenderness as the parting of Andromache and Hector ; is the Greek feeling about what was proper for women responsible for its being otherwise, and have the limits of the harder Hellenic taste lost for us one of the greatest passages in poetry? [Even in the two great scenes into which Andromache enters, the parting in the sixth and the lamentation in the twenty-second book, may be seen or suspected a restraining force, un- Homeric in its origin, that makes us think mainly not of her, but of Hector.] Hecuba, Cassandra, the strangely romantic figure of Briseis, mute except for her beauti- ful speech of lamentation over Patroclus, hardly count in the action^J ijArete, strong, gracious, capable, shows what the women of the Homeric, world could be like if they were not kept subordinate.^ Calypso and Circe are witch-princesses, not human and not designed to HOMER'S WOMEN 35 be human, though the former at least shows touches of very human and very womanly feeling.] LOne figure there is in the Odyssey never equalled except by the creator of Miranda and Rosalind, the girl-princess of Phaeacia. The poet sketched her in, largely, firmly, beautifully, and then stayed his hand. Perhaps no reader — certainly no modern reader — has not felt a pang of regret when she slips out of the story and out of our sight. Whether the poet felt that he had gone too far, that he had been carried away by the delight of creation beyond what the scheme of the Odyssey would bear; whether he was himself unconscious of the exquisite beauty of what he had created ; whether, here as elsewhere, the hard, unromantic Greek temper refused to let the picture be completed, are questions which at once invite and loMe discussion: but ;^^^gigpJjg^_disappears, and the sunlight seems to go but with her.-y ^Through both the Iliad and Odyssey the figure of another woman moves in a sort of golden mist. Helen of Troy has already in them taken the place which is hers for all time, of one set beyond the bounds of mortality, a thing enskied, from whom a fire goes out that devours many, but on whom the fire cannot take hold. Her words over the body of Hector are the high-water mark of the Iliad ; and it is not of Hector that they leave us thinking, but of her. Even in the domestic surroundings of her regained home in Lace- daemon she moves in the same unearthly calm, the white splendour of the Elysian plain which is destined for her final abiding-place, and whose atmosphere she 36 HOMER carries about with her even on this earth. All voices, like those of the Trojan elders on the city wall, fall soft when they speak of her. Only from her own lips is any word of blame allowed to reach her. She is the one instance in which the romance of mediaeval Greece has been left in full play. Except with Helen, there is little in Homer of any feeling for women that we I should call romantic, or even chivalrous. There is no (morbid sentiment about them ; but, on the other hand, there is the beginning of that harshness or chilliness which is a characteristic in developed Greek literature. It is one of the touches which make Patroclus different from all the other Achaean captains, that he had tried, clumsily perhaps, but affectionately, to make poor Briseis happy .^ It sets him on the same plane with Hector. The perfect tact and courtesy of Odysseus to Nausicaa, when he first meets her, as again when he quietly parts from her, hardly touch the edge of chivalrous feeling; and in contrast with them we have his savage burst of anger at Melantho,^ when he silences her by threatening to have her cut limb from limb — though no doubt she had provoked him beyond bearing and deserved all she got. But per- haps the most touching of all Homer's women is one obscure and unnamed ; the poor maidservant in Ithaca who was weaker than the rest, and had to go on grinding all night to finish her task when the rest of her fellow-servants were asleep. There seems here a / touch of something actual that had come to the poet himself and struck sharply through him the sense of 1 II. xix. 205-300. a Od. xviii. 337-9. HELEN OF TROY 37 the obscure labour and unsung pain that underhe the high pageant of life, war and adventure, the feats and feasts of princes. Perhaps in some Neleid palace, where at a banquet under the blaze of torches he had been singing to lords and ladies, like Demodocus in Phaeacia, of the glorious deeds of men, he had passed out of the darkened hall into the chill of morning ; and there, while dawn was yellowing over Mount Latmus, heard a sharp peal of thunder across the Icarian sea, and then from the mill-house in the palace yard the voice of a tired woman over her quern : " They have loosened my knees with cruel toil to grind their barley meal : may this dinner be their last." ^ On that island amid unsounded seas the waves washed up rough wreckage as well as treasure. Much of the fighting in the Iliad, or in such parts of the Iliad as appear to be extraneous to its essential scheme, is of this kind. But it is unsafe to argue that such passages are later accretions. Generally speaking, we cannot safely call any episode a later accretion which does not bear unmistakeable marks of lateness in its language. The author of the Iliad dealt prodigally with the whole material of the epic cycle, exulting in his riches, and confident, sometimes too much so, of the fusing and assimilating power of his own genius. But it is just this careless magnificence, guided by a lucid though not always a faultless instinct, that has given to the world in the Iliad what is probably on the whole the greatest poem ever made. Study of Homer from the point of view not of the scholar or commentator, 1 Od. XX. 102-119. 38 HOMER but of the poet — that inarticulate poet whose presence in us makes us love poetry — shows one more and more that what is put in or left out is in nearly all cases put in or left out for valid poetical reasons. This is one of the chief rewards, let me parenthetically add, of the translator of Homer, whose work is otherwise apt to be so short-lived and, except for himself, of so little value. While we may speak thus of the author of the Iliad, it is true also that the Iliad is the work of a whole nation. The nameless architect of Westminster Abbey, it has been finely said, was not this man or that, but the people of south-eastern England. Like a great mediaeval church, the Homeric poems embody the work of whole guilds of artists, of whole ages that appreciated art. In this sense the Iliad is a more artificial poem than the Aeneid or the Paradise Lost, as Westminster Abbey is than St. Paul's, because its origin was more complex, and its design lived and grew all the time it was being executed, The architect worked on a ground plan determined by existing building. He incorporated much of the earlier structure into his own work. Sometimes he pulled down and rebuilt, sometimes he remodelled into his own style or dialect without pulling down. For generations the masons were busy on the church, altering, extending, enriching. But the finished result thrills and burns throughout with the ardour of a continuous inspiration. This ardour is what sets the Iliad apart from all other poetry. In the fine phrase of Dryden, Homer THE DIVINE FIRE 39 " sets you on fire all at once, and never intermits his heat." The notes of Homer given by Arnold, that he is rapid, plain, direct, noble, are all exactly true of the Iliad; but together with these qualities is another of / at least equal importance, that the whole poem is at a \ white heat. Let me quote from a document now too little read, Pope's preface to his translation, that we may see how the Homeric ardour kindled an age which did not err on the side of over-enthusiasm. He is speaking of Homer's " invention," a technical term now obsolete, which bore much the same meaning as that which we now express by the term constxuclice or vital imaginaiionj^ " It is to the strength of this amazing invention we are to attribute that unequal fire and rapture which is so forcible in Homer, that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads him. Every- thing moves, everything lives, and is put in action ; the reader is hurried out of himself by the force of the poet's imagination, and turns in one place to a hearer, in another to a spectator. The course of his verses resembles that of the army he describes — ot S' ap 'laau oxret re Trvpl "^Ooop iracra vejULoiTO, * they pour along like a fire that sweeps the whole earth before it.' Exact disposition, just thought, correct elocution, polished numbers, may have been found in a thousand; but this poetic fire in a very few. Even in works where all those are imperfect or neglected, this can overpower criticism, and make us admire even while we disapprove. Nay, where this appears, though attended with absurdities, it brightens 40 HOMER all the rubbish about it, till we see nothing but its own splendour. This fire is discerned in Virgil, but discerned as through a glass, more shining than fierce, but everywhere equal and constant ; in Milton it glows like a furnace kept up to an uncommon ardour by the force of art ; in Shakespeare it strikes before we are aware, like an accidental fire from heaven; but in Homer, and in him only, it burns everywhere clearly, and everywhere irresistibly. This strong and ruling faculty was like a powerful star, which in the violence of its course drew all things within its vortex. It seemed not enough to have taken in the whole circle of arts, and the whole compass of nature, to supply his maxims and reflections ; all the inward passions and affections of mankind, to furnish his characters; and all the outward forms and images of things for his descriptions; but wanting yet an ampler sphere to expatiate in, he opened a new and boundless walk for his imagination, and created a world." Here for once the Iliad has been praised adequately, and one could wish that the passage were set to be learned by heart by all who approach the study of Homer. The fire of imagination lifts the height and swells the compass of a subject itself curiously con- tracted. (_The Wrath of Achilles is but an episode in a single war, as war itself is but an episode in the whole pageant of life. To this limit the subject of the Iliad is formally restricted in its opening lines ; and lest we should lose sight of it, the restriction is as formally repeated in the speech of Zeus just before the crisis of the action, and emphasised still further by the THE WRATH 41 magnificent image immediately following, of the far- travelled man whose mind ranges with the speed of thought over the whole length and breadth of the world.-^ Even good critics have stumbled here, and insisted that the action ought to be carried on to the death of Achilles. The author of the Iliad may be trusted to have known his own purpose ; he certainly could not have stated it more clearly. And indeed it is obvious, if one takes the pains to think the matter out, that the action stops exactly where it should, and that to continue further would have thrown the whole poem out of scale. Doubtless it might have pleased Homer to choose a better subject than that of the Iliad, or at least a different one ; but it is equally certain that it did not please him to do so. The Wrath burns in a world which it transforms into fire. Nowhere else, except in Dante, does fire so penetrate the whole structure of a poem. It is perpetually present in single phrases or elaborated descriptions ; fire blazing in a forest, fire licking up the plain and scorching the river, fire signalling from a besieged town, fire flashing out of heaven, fire leaping on a city of men while the houses crumble away in the roaring furnace, the fire blazing round the head of Achilles by the trenches, the fire that streams all night from the burning of Patroclus, the constant sense of the day coming when holy Troy itself will flare up in the great doom's image. Ido- meneus in his richly chased armour is " like in his strength to fire." The Trojan host follows Hector 1 11. XV. 49-77, 80-2. 42 HOMER " even as flame." " Like flame," Hector leads them on. In a splendid reduplication of phrase he declares his resolve to face Achilles, "yes, even though his hands are as fire, though his hands are as fire and his might as flaming iron." Four times over the full fury of battle is summed up in one intense line, " Thus they fought in the body of blazing fire." The curtain falls on the slaking of the burning for Hector, " as far as the strength of the fire had gone," with flame-bright wine under the kindling fires of dawn. The whole Iliad moves in this element of intense ardour. Ordinary life is going on its course all the while, but we only catch glimpses of it. The de- scription at the end of Book VII. of the chaflering in the Achaean camp between the soldiers and the pro- vision ships from Lemnos gives briefly but vividly enough a picture of the traffic of the everyday world going on alongside of the tragedies of kingdoms and the feats of heroes. Domestic life is absent from the main action except where, as in the Hector and An- dromache episode, it is seen lit up by the lurid light of war. The allusions to it are chiefly in similes, so used as to bring the action into relation with an opener, a wider and less intense life. They are like the little bits of lovely rural or domestic background in old Italian pictures. Such are the vignettes of the poor spinning- woman and her children (xii. 433-5), and of the boys harrying the wasps' nest (xvi. 259-62)! or the many pictures drawn from the life of the herds- man or sailor, the hunter, or smith, or ploughman. One of the most remarkable is that (v. 770-1) of the THE HOMERIC BACKGROUND 43 man sitting, like a Theocritean shepherd, on a cliff-top and gazing over the purple sea to where the horizon melts in haze. The largest and most highly finished is the set of scenes portrayed on the shield of Achilles. They give a picture of the whole world — a world wider than that of the Iliad, or even than that of the Odyssey, inasmuch as it includes the whole of ordinary human life. There were wrought the earth, and sky, and sea; the unwearying sun and filling moon and all the stars ; cities of men in peace and war, with their weddings, feasts, and lawsuits, their raids and sieges and battles ; ploughing and reaping and vintage, river- meadows and hill-pastures, tillage and hunting. All that Heimskringla, that round world encircled by the outer seas, lies in cool daylight ; the fighting is not a strife of heroes " mixed with auxiliar gods "; the Ocean- river is not bordered by the groves of Persephone or approached from a witch's island ; there is no word of the purpose of God being fulfilled through woes in- numerable, or of destruction being spun for men that there might be a song for times to come. In the main^ jLCtiiMi-^f--^a,JQiad.Jtto element is felt ev^ir^piherej it even shapes and colours the physical background. l[t^is a land of thunder and earthquakes, of God-haunted mpunffins and seas. Twice over the sky drizzles blood. The plain of Troy is like an amphitheatre ringed round with awful faces. Before the city with its God-built walls, swept by the winds of the world, gods charge down upon one another in the melee, or sit apart watching the battle. From their cloud-capped towers, Zeus on Ida and 44 HOMER Poseidon on Samothrace look down into the arena.. Silver-shod goddesses rise, like a mist, out of the grey sea. Lemnos is the home not only of the merchants who supply the camp, but of Sleep, the brother of Death. On the crest of Ida, hidden in a golden cloud that the sun cannot pierce, is a marvellous sub-tropical paradise, where the dew-drenched lotus, crocus, hyacinth do not merely, as in Milton's cool Eden, "with rich inlay broider the ground/' but rush out of the divine earth. Over this scene passes, too often for us to regard it as accidental, a mystery of darkness. Night, of which as a half-personified Power Zeus himself stands in awe, descends upon and involves the action. In the cooler atmosphere of the Odyssey night is for sleep, or at most for telling tales in the hall of a king's house, or sheltered in a swineherd's cottage from the wintry wind and driving rain. The cresset borne by Athena in the hall at Ithaca to light it up for the moving of the armour is magical, but with no natural magic. But much of the action in the Iliad is heightened by this sense of natural magic where it takes place in the dark: the troubled council in the Achaean camp and the embassy of Phoenix ; the Dolo- neia, with its perilous night journey, where the thick-muffled silence is broken by the cry of the unseen heron ; the coming of the Winds from Thrace to blow all night round the pyre of Patroclus and sink with the sinking flame just before dawn; the visit of Priam to the camp and his return with Hector's body. Even daylight is often obscured by strange FIRE AND NIGHT 45 mists and supernatural darkness, that now aid and now hinder flight, within which men struggle blindly and unseen. "Thus fought they," about the corpse of Patroclus, " in the body of fire, nor would you say that either sun or moon yet endured, for in that battle all the captains were wrapt in mist, while over the rest of the field warriors fought in clear air and sharp sunlight, and not a cloud was seen on the land or on the hills." From that " affliction of darkness and battle " rose the prayer of Aias : " our Father, save us from the dark- ness ; give sight to our eyes, and in the light destroy us if thou wilt." ^ On this lurid shifting background, now incredibly clear, now wrapped in a pall of darkness, the action burns. The waves of battle surge backward and forward across the plain. Kings and stately women look on from the battlements of the city. Among the dense ranks of spearmen the princes, like knights at Cregy or Roosebek, move ponderously along the fight- ing line. They are heavily sheathed in bronze plate- armour, with huge crests and immense leathern bronze- clamped pavises, " like towers," reaching from neck to heel. They tilt at one another with long fifteen-foot spears, with sword and mace and battle-axe. Helenus swings a huge Thracian sword, like Durindana or Morglay, that shears away head and head-piece. From behind the knights' pavises the archers, crouching " like a child by its mother," rain their arrows. Teucer, like Einar in Olaf Tryggvesson's last battle, shoots from the side of Aias, striking down man after 1 II. xvii. 366-73, 645-7. 46 HOMER man, until his bowstring breaks, and he betakes himself to his heavy armour and long bronze-headed spear. The clatter of weapons on plated helms and cheek- pieces resounds like an armourer's forge. Huge stones are hurled as if from perrieres by knights who have lost their spears; where one hits, a prince crashes down with a rattle of armour, " like a tower amid the throng of fight." Above all the clash and din rise the voices of the captains, men of great stature and pro- digious strength. Some fight in armour splendidly damascened in gold or silver and inlaid with enamel. Achilles can run at full speed in all his battle-gear, a feat like those told of Richard Coeur de Lion. Aias wields a thirty-foot pike at the defence of the ships. " As when winter torrents flow down the mountains to a watersmeet and join their raging floods through the deep ravine ; " " as when angry winds shaking a deep wood in the mountain dells clash and shatter the long boughs," so they fight ; " and the iron roaring went up to the vault of heaven through the unharvested sky." ^ Here and there, while winged arrows leap from the bowstring and stones clash upon , shields, a mailed figure lies still amid the whirl of dust, great and fallen greatly, his feats of knighthood forgotten, in the sleep of bronze. Behind on both sides rises the clatter of chariots and the continuous shouting of the massed soldiery, close-ranked with shield locked in shield : " the sound of the two hosts went up to the firmament and the splendours of God." ^ Such is the world of the Iliad, set before us with 1 11. iv. 452-6, xvi. 765-9, xvii. 424, 5. « II. xiii. 837. THE SPLENDOUR OF LIFE 47 incomparable fire and splendour by the genius of a great poet ; a world as brilliantly coloured as that of Froissart, as tense and vivid as that of Shakespeare. /If we ask what relation it has to reality, we raise the ^ whole question of the relation of art to life. The. Homeric world is a world imagined by Homer. It is placed in a past time, evidently thought of as distant, though there are no exact marks of chronology any more than there are in the Morte cC Arthur, The destruction of the Achaean rampart, after Troy had been left desolate, is a thing long accomplished ; " so were Poseidon and Apollo to do in the aftertime."^ Helen in^ the Iliad, Alcinous in the Odyssey, speak of the whole war of Troy as ordained for a theme for /poets of a remote future. But it was not so distant as to be wholly alien from actual life; it was not un- interesting or unintelligible to the poet's audience. . The life of a nation is partly to be sought in the I mirror held up to it by its national poetry. But it has another and larger side. In the Iliad, as in Froissart, we hear little of the common people who were to become the nation of the future, and nothing at all of the gathering forces which were to sweep away the mediaeval world of romance and chivalry as the nine days' torrential rain swept away the Achaean rampart and laid the sand smooth on the beach. The professional minstrel or guild of minstrels is not con- cerned with common life. The common people in the Odyssey, the " princely swineherd," Eurycleia the nurse, Melanthius and Melantho, all the rest upon """^ ^* 1 IL xii. 34. 48 HOMER the crowded living canvas, are only studied in their relation to the principal figures ; they are an enriched background. In the Iliad, but for the single burlesqued figure of Thersites, there are none. Whether the Homeric poems took shape at some feudal court like that of the Neleids of Miletus, or in later and more fully Hellenised surroundings, they are in essence court poetry, adapted to the taste of a court, or of a public which took its taste from that of a court. For the under side of that brilliant tapestry we have to turn to Hesiod. Ill THE HOMERIC EPIC There seems no reason to discard the tradition whicli makes the two bodies of poetry passing under the names of Homer and Hesiod about contemporary. Whatever amount of recasting took place from time to time in the manual known as the Works and Bays, or, as the title might be more aptly translated, the Farmer's Calendar, the life it sets before us is substan- tially that of the time in which the Homeric poems were produced. The world dealt with in the epic is going on somewhere overhead, unintelligibly, only felt by common people through the added pressure of misery that it brings upon them. " The son of Cronus now and then," says the rustic poet, *' destroys a broad army or a wall, or takes vengeance on their ships in the sea" — aWore S' auT€ rj Tcovye crrpaTOP cvpvv airdoKearev rj oye Tei-^o^ tj vea^ €V irovTW K.poviSr]g airoTLVVTai avTwv} This is to him, and to the people from whom he sprang and to whom he belongs, the whole upshot of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hesiod's picture of life, vivid and detailed as it is, has no beauty. The life he 1 W.andD.,2^h-l. 49 D ^^\ 50 HOMER knows is "hidden," obscure and laborious: Kpvyl^avreg yap tyovcTi Oeol ^lov avOpwiroicnv} It is the wrong side of the pattern of the round world portrayed on the shield of Achilles, the subterranean crypt of that splendid church with its soaring columns and traceried vaultings, its organ-music and window-fires. The difference of subject and treatment is sharply given in two phrases : Homer sings of the /cXea avSpwp, the feats of heroes, Hesiod of the epya avQpwirwvy the industries of men. If the Iliad is the Morte d! Arthur, the Works and Days is the Biblia Pauperum of early Hellas. In the rare passages where Hesiod rises into the epic tone, it is with a difference of accent and intention that makes his language less like Homer's than like that of the Hebrew prophets who were the first voice of the democracy. The men of the bronze age, he says, went down nameless into the pit, and terrible as they were, death took hold upon them. Kcu Toi fi€V "^eipecra-Lv viro a-iperepijcri SafJicvTeg prjarap eg evpwevra Sojulop Kpvepov ^AiSao vwvujULPOL • OdvaTog Se Koi. cKirayXovg irep eovrag eiXe /xeXa?, \ajuL7rp6v S' eXnrov (pdog tjeXloio. The tone and even the very wording of this remark- able passage are just those of Isaiah in one of his grim dirges of awful exultation over fallen kings and king- doms.^ In a later age, the heroes of Thebes and Troy perished in " wicked war," no longer spoken of in the epic phrase as " man- ennobling." The Odyssey gives us 1 W. and D.y 42. ^ ^ ^wd D., 152-5 ; cf. Isaiah xiv. 4-23. THE HESIODIC WORLD 51 a flash of this lower world, working itself up painfully through the dark, in those famous lines where the ghost of Achilles desires, if only he might be alive, to belong to it, to be a day-labourer on the farm of a poor man like Perses of Ascra. It is a world of hard work and hunger — alOoira Xi/uLOPy " flame-bright hunger," as Hesiod calls it,-^ in one of those curious phrases taken from the court poets and made, half in innocence, half in satire, into an awkward ornament. The voice of the people was still inarticulate ; it halted and stammered. The epic diction is used in a timid, laboured way, as the only known means of expression for any continuous or considered statement. So, too, the virtues inculcated are those of hard work, secrecy, thrift ; they are virtues imposed by necessity, not freely chosen. The large epic generosity is for those whose generosity costs them little. The tales of poets are for the rich, who can afford to waste their time listening to them. In certain things — in a kind of close humorous observation of nature, and in the recognition of the passion of love between men and women as one of the large forces in life for good or evil — the Hesiodic poetry preserves elements which the epic at some time or other had deliberately discarded, though they have left traces of their presence. Of the two, Hesiod is much the more religious. On one side his religion bears the original meaning of that word ; it is formal, cramping, superstitious ; on another it reaches deeper than anything in Homer. For with Homer the Gods are almost part of the scenery ; the moral government 1 W. (md D., 363. >i^ 52 HOMER of the universe is a dim background expressed under symbols like the Weirds, the Vengeances, the Prayers, the Watching ; the real divinity is the unconquerable mind of man. Homeric religion is that of^a^^verning class, simple, and not deep. If the result is that much in Homer is frankly irreligious, on the other hand there is no great national poem so free from supersti- tion, or in which there is less of preaching and of forced moral. Hector's defiance of augury is the tone of the whole Iliad. There is no hint in Homer, for instance, of the later moralisation that he was betrayed by the armour of Patroclus, or dragged in death by the belt that had been a gift from Aias. The relation of man to the divine powers is one rather of traditional respect than of either love or fear. They are but secondary aids to man's own strength of spirit and sense of right. While on the whole the Gods love righteousness and hate iniquity, while their vengeance is conceived to follow, sooner or later, any abnormal transgression, it is neither necessary nor safe to carry this doctrine into particulars ; if the matter be pressed further, they are found partial, jealous, unscrupulous. The general attitude towards religion is, to put it in modern terms, undogmatic and undenominational. It may best be illustrated by an often-quoted passage of the Odyssey. Peisistratus in Pylos lays the cup in the hands of the stranger, bidding him make libation from it and pass it on to his companion : " He, too," he adds, " no doubt prays to those who die not, for all mankind require Gods." The stranger, who is Athena in person, not only accepts this statement as adequate, but is highly THE EPIC RELIGION 53 pleased by its good sense/ More exact identification of Athena may be left to the theologians. The famous simile of the devastating autumn floods in the Iliad approaches the Hesiodic spirit : ^ they are sent by Zeus in anger against those "who judge crooked judgments in the market-place with a high hand ; " but the suffering comes not on the powerful wrong-doers, but on the people : /nivvOei Se re epy avOpwTTcov — " the industries of men " (Hesiod's very phrase) "are minished." We have a touch of the Hesiodic world in other similes, such as that of the poor widow waking to earn her children's bread, or in the repeated mention of disinherited or portion- less men who have taken service as mercenaries. Akin to the Hesiodic spirit, too, is the heavy humour of the Homeric captains ; the clumsy jest of Patroclus over Kebriones, which pleases him so that he has to repeat it three times over ; or the chaff of Idomeneus about marrying a daughter of Agamemnon.^ " I am a great eater of beef," any one of them might say who thought about it, " and I believe that does harm to my wit." The Menelaus of the Odyssey, a character singu- larly like the Theseus of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is first cousin to Hesiod's oppressors, the close-fisted, heavy-handed Boeotian country gentlemen. His fancy of expropriating the population of a whole village to provide an estate for a friend, his suggestion to that friend's son of a tour through the country with the view of picking up some portable property in each 1 Od. iii. 40-52. ^ n xvi. 384-92. 3 II. xvi. 745-50, xiii. 378. 54 HOMER town they visited,^ would have invited very Hesiodic comments from the people immediately concerned. But nothing in Homer hints at what is felt as an undertone in Hesiod, the coming of democracy, the self-consciousness of a whole people. Not long, as length of time is measured in the history of human development, after the Iliad took its final shape, the world swung into a new course. Hellas crowned and killed the epic. Only after Hellas had come to be absorbed in a half-Hellenised world did men of letters begin, like the architects of revived Gothic in the nineteenth century, to build anew in imitation of the mediaeval manner. In neither attempt was there any enduring life. Before this great change had happened, or while it was happening, came the final construction of the Odyssey. It is a significant fact that criticism of Homer, where the Odyssey is not specifically in question, has always tended to become criticism of the Iliad. Whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the relative merit or the relative charm of the two poems, no one could deny that the earlier is also the greater. If we are to give a reason why this is so, it seems to be that the epic realised its full potencies in the Iliad — ecr;(e (pva-ip — just at the brief culminating time of the formative imagination while it worked in the epic material. Our Odyssey is held by scholars from considerations of language to be at least a generation later than our Iliad. Considering it as poetry we arrive at exactly the 1 Od. iv. 174-7, XV. 79-85. THE GENIUS OF THE ODYSSEY 55 same conclusion. It implies the Iliad, as the archi- tecture of the fourteenth century implies that of the thirteenth. It attempts a further advance upon an altered method. But in it poetry burns at a lower heat. A similar change passed over mediaeval architecture with great rapidity towards the end of the thirteenth century. Men tried to repeat and outdo what had been done to perfection by their predecessors. They produced work more in- genious, more daring in construction, more richly ornamented. But it had the seeds of weakness in it; we begin to foresee the end. The imagination of the artist whp produced the Iliad is felt at a furnace-heat through the whole poem, even where he left great pieces of earlier work practically un- touched, where they did not wholly fuse and coalesce. The Odyssey is planned more ambitiously, more dexterously; construction is passing from an art into a science, architecture into engineering. Nothing in the Iliad is such a feat of design as the way j in which the first Jour books of the Odyssey do no^ bring Odysseus on to the scene at all and yet imply him through every line as the central figure. A faultless sense of proportion keeps the poem wholly clear of divided interest. But, from whatever reasons, the genius flagged later. The Odyssey reminds one of a church begun when architecture had reached its perfection, on which the age lavished all its skill and riches, but where the imaginative impulse gave out before it was completed, or where part of the structure, built hastily or recklessly, collapsed and 56 HOMER was rebuilt poorly by feebler hands. It stands to the Iliad in somewhat the same relation as the Cathe- dral of Beauvais does to that of Chartres. These two churches are not more than twenty or thirty years apart ; and it is not certain that a longer interval separates the two poems. But we have no contem- pora^Bjpcords, no authentic tradition, to help us to decide. All through, even where it is at its best, even in the matchless sixth and thirteenth books, we have this sense that the Odyssey is at a lower heat than the Iliad. Up to Book XIX. nothing can be more admirable than its construction. But it is built up, not run into the mould while still incandescent. The difference in the opening of the two poems is charac- teristic. Instead of the great triple-bayed porch, high-vaulted and glowing with colour, through which we approach the main action of the Odyssey in the three successive acts that unroll themselves at Ithaca, at Pylos, at Lacedaemon, we pass through a simple door and at one step are in the vast nave of the Iliad. The subject is set out with extreme though masterly rapidity. In the first two hundred and fifty lines we have Achilles and Agamemnon, Aias, Idomeneus, Calchas, Odysseus, Nestor, Priam and man-slaying Hector, Clytemnestra, Briseis. None of them are explained ; the artist is perfectly sure of himself and of them. Through all the Iliad there is this fiery rapidity. Yet it is combined with extra- ordinary leisureliness. This has to be borne in mind when we speak of two notes of Homer being that he is THE EPIC MOVEMENT 57 uniformly plain and uniformly rapid. No poet can be more terse or more diffuse, more simple or more elabo- rate. Two scenes in the Iliad may be cited as showing these qualities in vivid contrast. One is the episode of Glaucus and Diomede in Book VI. Their meeting is told in two lines ; then over a hundred are filled by their splendid and richly embroidered speeches. These include the stories of the frenzy of Lycurgus and the life and death of Bellerophon, the latter introduced by that noble simile of the forest leaves which includes the best-known single line in Homer. The other is the last battle of Hector in Book XXII. The anguish of that hour is drawn out almost beyond endurance ; it seems to be going on almost for ever, as in a dream. The action stands still, advances, recedes. An endless dreary procession of thought circles through Rector's mind while retreat is still possible, like ^he vision of a whole lifetime rising before a drowning man : the reproach of Polydamas ; the sickening thought of being put to shame before the Trojan women; the awful sense of his own fatal error of judgment, for which only death can atone ; idle thoughts of giving up everything for which the war was fought, and the recognition of their useless- ness ; at last, in all but intolerable poignancy, that strange vision of his own youth, and a boy and girl whispering soft words to each other. Then comes the dreadful moment when his courage breaks down ; the long hopeless flight and fierce pursuit ; the gleam of hope and recovery of self-control; the desperate rush at Achilles when the goddess has tricked him 58 HOMER out of his spear. Again and again we seem at the very climax, and again and again it is deferred. At last it comes. The spear-head crashes through his neck, and all is over but the last gasping words of the dying man and Achilles' reply, swift now, terse, edged like bronze. " Well I know thee and see thee as thou art, nor was I to persuade thee ; for verily thy heart is iron within thee. Look to it now lest I become a Wrath of the Gods on thee in the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo shall slay thee, for all thy valour, in the Scaean gates." " Lie dead : and I will accept my weird when- soever Zeus and the deathless Gods are pleased to accomplish it." It is this combination of fiery speed and all but stationary movement that makes the Iliad unique. The movement of the Odyssey is more equable and slower. The artifice of rhythmic construction is used with perfect ease and mastery, and lends itself to a treatment less elastic but more flexible. I can here merely indicate the way in which it is applied to two main motives in the Odyssey. One of these is the story of Odjsseus' own adventures between the fall of Troy and the opening of the action. The other is the story of the fatal home-coming of Agamemnon, against which the triumphant return of Odysseus is throughout set in sharp relief. Both are given briefly by Zeus in Book I. The latter is repeated first by Athena to Telemachus, again by Nestor at Pylos, again by Menelaus at Sparta as it had been told CONSTRUCTIONAL RHYTHM 59 him by the sea-wizard, yet again by the ghost of Agamemnon himself in the Summoning of the Dead. But the variations are so skilful and so apt that there is no sense of mere repetition, only of cumulative effect. So likewise with the tales of his own adventures told by Odysseus. Of these there are no less than seven: the stories told to Nausicaa in Book VI., to Arete and Alcinous in Book VII., to the whole Phaeacian court in Books IX. to XII.; the adroit, swiftly-invented account he gives of himself to Athena when he meets her on the beach in the heavy morning mist ; the elaborate ^nd plausible romance told to Eumaeus in Book XIV., and partly repeated to Antinous, with such modifications as suited the imme- diate occasion, in Book XVII. ; finally, the extraordi- nary story he tells to Penelope on the very eve of the suitor-slaying, for no other reason, as it would seem, beyond sheer excitement and delight in his own powers of invention. In these and other instances the devices of postponement and varied repetition are used with perfect skill and effect up to the crisis of the action, the scene in the hall at Ithaca towards which the whole poem has been leading, when all the company gradually go out, Athena holds the cresset while Telemachus and his father remove the armour, and at last, by the glimmer of the midnight fire, Odysseus and Penelope are face to face alone. And then nothing happens. Just at this point the constructive power, until then masterly and fault- less, gives way ; and the end of the Odyssey, to put it bluntly, is bungled. The artifice of postpone- 60 HOMER ment has been tried once too often ; and though all the resources of poetry are lavished on it, the action is only set agoing again by an obvious effort. There are still indeed incidents and passages of great beauty. Nothing could be finer than the vision of Theoclymenus at the banquet, when he cries out that the sun is eclipsed, and sees the suitors wrapped in a pall of night, with tears running down their cheeks, and blood spattered on the walls ; or the scene of the actual drawing of the bow; or that where Odysseus strips off his beggar's rags and leaps up tense and erect on the door-sill, pouring the arrows down before his feet ; or the summoning of Eurycleia from the locked house where nothing had been seen and nothing heard except scuffling and groans, to find Odysseus standing in the hall alone, and round him a great pile of dead men. But the trial of the bow is introduced clumsily, with insufficient motive ; details of the battle in the hall have been noted by all critics as partly inconsistent and partly unintelligible. The action is merely retarded by the arrival of Philoetius by the ferry, and the fresh insults of Ctesippus; here, and still more so in the scene known as the Second Summoning of the Dead, the artifice of repetition, like the artifice of postponement, is used once too often, and with inferior skill; and then the poem is huddled up to a scrappy, strained, ineffective conclusion. The best Alexandrian critics saw in the whole of the twenty-fourth and a portion of the twenty-third book the work of a continuator. This may be so ; but it is earlier that the organic structure and movement begin to break down. The THE CHANGE OF LIFE 61 exact turning point is the speech of Penelope in lines 509 to 553 of Book XIX. It is a brilliant and desperate effort to regain the high tension that had been let slack in the Niptra. It includes the famous nightingale-simile, a perfect miracle of language, but language that is passing from epic into lyric. Pene- lope's description of her dream and awakening which follows it, is nearly as remarkable ; it has a simplicity almost like that of Wordsworth ; but we feel in it just a suspicion oi simplesse ; its tone is that not of the epic but of the idyl. With all its mixed lyric and idyllic beauty, the passage is in its artifice less Homeric than Tennysonian. It is the swan-note of the dying epic. We have passed at one step, as it were, from Homer to Theocritus. Once this step had been taken, it could not be retraced. The change is not in language, nor in metre, nor superficially at least, in handling; it is a change in the meaning of poetry. And this in turn is due to a change in the way of regarding and interpreting life. Now and then in Homer, but very rarely, we come on a passage like that of the pigeon- shooting in Book XXIII. of the Iliad, which we can say at the first glance and without hesitation is un- Homeric, which stands as glaringly apart from its surroundings as a seventeenth-century monument in a thirteenth-century church. But the difference in spirit is generally much subtler and more indefinable. For testing what is really Homeric, this changed spirit, and not apparent imitation or repetition, is the touchstone to be applied. 62 HOMER —^ All art is imitation ; all mediaeval art is founded on repetition. The artifice of repetition, clearly present as a structural principle in the Iliad, and used with such elaborate skill in the design of the Odyssey, is characteristic of both the Iliad and Odyssey in its application to language. Much certainly, probably most, of what is suspected as copying by a later hand is deliberate and original ; like the recurrence, with subtle variations, of the patterned figures in a tapestry or the carved figures in a processional frieze. For the genius of the epic this kind of repetition was an essential element in design. We judge all these kinds of art stupidly, if we apply to them rules of com- position and perspective which are relevant to other and later kinds of art. Whether on a larger or on a smaller scale this has always to be borne in mind with Homer. We misjudge the Aristeia of the captains — Aias, or Diomede, or Idomeneus — in their relation to the scheme of the Iliad, if we fail to realise that the epic perspective, like that of the early painting, repre- sents the secondary planes on practically the same scale as the primary. Let me quote some luminous words of Burne-Jones, given in his Life, regarding the theory and practice of mediaeval art as it was under- stood by the two artists who in our own times were most in sympathy with it. " We have lost one thing in the world," he says, " which we need never expect to get back again, and that is the right to put a figure /n the background of the same size as those in the front. The Greeks did it, and the old Italians, and it used to be quite right, but we can't any longer. EPIC DECORATION 63 Figures diminished by distance are a bore. Morris, who was so rightly minded, as he always was, had a very true saying about it. He was fond of insisting that heads in decoration ought to be of exactly the same size, and go one just behind the other like shillings in a row." The art of Homer, it cannot be too much kept in mind, is in many essentials, like his world, mediaeval. Just so likewise we misjudge the repetition of lines or phrases or passages, if we forget that such repetition was, like that of flowers in a tapestry or diapers in a painting, deliberate in the artist and delightful to his audience. It is in view of this that we must regard what has been called epic slang, the lavish, repeated use of stock epithets, stock phrases, stock incidents or reflections — all that a more fastidious taste or a more easily exhausted interest disparages as the journalism of the epic. In the process through which poetry comes into existence at all, this note of repetition, of pattern, is an essential element. Some patterns are mechanical ; but that is a very different thing from saying that art can dispense with pattern. It is difficult to say — and certainly the artist could not say himself — at what point the evolution of pattern ceases to be creative and becomes a mechanism, or a trick. The question has been raised, and keenly debated, in other forms of art than poetry — one notable instance is as regards Mozart's music. The inspiration — to use that con- venient word without being committed to any of its various meanings — fluctuates between limits which 64 HOMER are not clearly assignable. It will be a matter partly of artistic sensitiveness, partly of trained judgment, partly of sympathy between the poet and the reader of the poetry, to distinguish in Homer or in any other poet, the illuminating from the otiose epithet, the imaginative or musical wording of a phrase from the formulary tag, the impassioned statement of truth from the truism or commonplace. The fire of poetry burns at varying degrees in any large poem ; its living and quickening power were not originally the same throughout, and have withstood the action of time still more variably. The business of its interpreters, the reward of its lovers, is to revitalise as much of it as possible. This is a work implying thought and study as well as sympathy. No labour is wasted in this thought and study ; for we shall often find after it, that the dull line or phrase or passage becomes irra- diated ; that we see at last what we are meant to see, and feel as the poet felt. It is in such a way that the interpretation of poejbry, the otherwise arid task of the commentator, may be of real use. Perhaps of all the ornaments of style the epithet is the one which has been, and is, most abused in poetry, or for that matter in prose. "Very good orators, when they are out," Rosalind tells us, " they will spit ; " and for poets lacking matter the cleanliest shift is to fall back on epithets, which like rouge and padding are meant to conceal — while they often in fact emphasise — the want of real colour and substance. But in its inception, and in its proper use, the epithet has the effect of immensely increasing and enriching THE HOMERIC EPITHET 65 the poet's vocabulary. Not attached to the word as an ornament, but welded on to it as an integral part of the meaning, it yields an unlimited supply of what are in effect new words, free from the harshness of novelty, easily understood, adaptable to the expression of varying shades of meaning. By the variation of epithets the poet has command of a whole set of verbal symbols to express a single thing or person in different aspects, at different angles, in the reflected colour of different surroundings. Poetry, when the Iliad and Odyssey took shape, had become a matured art with its recognised symbols, counters that had already worn smooth or were wearing smooth by use. But these symbols in most cases must have still retained much of their original value; they were not inter- changeable ; each stood for something definite to the poet's imagination, and conveyed a substantive mean- ing to his hearers. To realise that meaning often enables us to recapture a whole point of view, even a whole aspect of life or nature as it presented itself to the poet, that we should otherwise have missed. Various kinds of epithet may be distinguished in Homer. There is the proper or established attribute, which is so associated with its subject that it may be used almost indifferently with or without the noun substantive. This often carries something of a ritual or hieratic significance. The Cloud-Gathering, the Grey-Eyed, the Golden- Spindled are epithets well on their way to becoming proper names, like the Virgin or the Almighty. So, too, with princes and heroes ; E 66 HOMER the Fleet-Footed and the Many-Counselled are known without any further name as the principal figures of the Iliad and Odyssey : so even with natural objects invested with some special sacredness ; we find the Wet spoken of simply, alongside of the fuller phrase that speaks of the wet paths of the sea. Again, there is a whole class which name a place or object in what we might call its heraldic colours ; thus it is that Homer speaks of windy Troy, wide-lawned Elis, hollow - sunken Lacedaemon, horse - pasturing Argos. Or we have a whole group of words that are attached on different occasions to the same object, and reflect light on one another. Such are the epithets " rose-footed " and " saffron-gowned " applied to dawn ; such, applied to the sea, is a group of three, " violet- coloured," " wine-bright," " unvintaged." They are used singly, never together; but each implies the others, and they convey (or any one of them conveys in the reflected light of the others) a complex image, not descriptive only but in the highest degree imagina- tive. Other complex epithets are so curiously con- structed as to make a whole picture by themselves, without interrupting the movement of the poem by a long parenthesis, or burdening it with a formal description. These are peculiarly Homeric in the* richness of their sound as well as of their meaning ; ' words like a\i/ULvpi]€VTa, eivocricpvWov, aiOprjy€veT7}9i the " seaward - murmuring river," the " foliage - tossing mountain," the "crystal-cradled north wind." Two of them applied to war, " man-ennobling " and " mortal- destroying " — /BpoToXoiyog and KuSidi^ipa — ^give between EPIC ENRICHMENT 67 them something of the whole moral purpose of the Iliad. We cannot always read such meaning into the Homeric epithets. Sometimes they seem to be used from mere habit; sometimes more to fill up a line than for any larger purpose; sometimes for simple pleasure, from intoxication with the beauty of sound which even now is irresistible in Homer, and which must have meant so much more when it was all new. As the raw material of poetry, the Greek language stands alone. A language that can, quite simply and unaffectedly, render the words " from ships and huts " by vewv airo kou KXicridcov, or " sunrise " by ai/roXal ijeXloLo, has no need to bolster itself out with merely ornamental epithets ; yet to this beauty of sound the epithets contribute largely, and often we need look no farther than this for their motive, or at least for their justification. Consider now a poetical ornament on a larger scale, which is equally characteristic in Homer, the similfi. In poetry of a low heat this tends to become merely ornamental. It serves to enrich a passage which would otherwise be bald or languid ; and, as such passages will occur in a long narrative poem, it has its legitimate use for that purpose. But in poetry of a high tem- perature any enrichment which is mere decoration is out of place; it only interrupts and retards, unless together with its quality as ornament it illuminates its context. This it can do by throwing a fresh imaginative light on the action to which it is attached, either by reinforcing it or, which is the more frequent use, by 68 B#MER relieving it upon a background differing in tone, yet such that the two tones produce a single harmony. In all these uses the Homeric simile reached perfection. The nightingale passage in the Odyssey, to which reference has already been made, is perhaps the best instance of a simile used for purely decorative value. But there, as we noted, it is on the edge of misuse. It is an ornament detachable without loss, and there- fore for the essential purposes of the poem irrelevant in spite of its great beauty. It would be easy to in- stance a score of others, in both Iliad and Odyssey, which to a like beauty of language add the imaginative light, and become part of the essence of the scene or action they illustrate : that, for instance, of the rain- drooped poppy, in "some tempestuous morn in early June," Kap-TTw BpiOo/iievr] voTLrjcrl re €iapivij(nv, to which the son of Priam is compared as he sinks under the V arrow of Teucer ; or that of the sea churned into crested blackness by cross winds and covering the beach with seaweed, used as a comparison for the confusion and gloom of the Achaean army when they have been driven back on the ships and only nightfall has saved them from utter rout ; or that of the great snowfall, " on a winter day when Zeus the Counsellor has set him to snow, and lulls the winds and snows continually, until he has covered the high hill-peaks and jutting headlands, and the grassy plains and rich tillage of men," to which is compared the thick shower of stones from both sides in the fast-locked battle at the wall.^ In other instances enrichment is accumulated ^ 11. viii. 306-8, ix. 4-7, xii. 278-286. THE HOMERIC SIMILE 69 in order to dilute rather than to concentrate ; not to add imaginative value to the action, but because the action is at so high a tension that it requires relief, that it not only will bear any amount of decoration, but demands it. Such is the triple inverted simile which introduces the rally of the Achaeans when pent in on the beach, where the sea washed up to the Argive huts and ships; and the shouting of the charging hosts was so terrible that neither thunder of breakers, nor the roar of blazing fire, nor the voice of the furious wind was like to it.^ Or en- riched ornament may be used, not where the action is at a higher tension, but where it is more formal and stately. The celebrated instance is the accumu- lation of no less than six fully elaborated similes before the Catalogue in Book II. of the Iliad, like trumpets sounding over a clear space before the coming of a great procession. Most commonly, however, these comparisons reflect upon some tense situation or violent action the quietness of nature or of natural things ; often with a sense of beauty more delicate and obser- vant than we find again until nature was looked on by the eyes of Western Europe, and with a feeling for the beauty of common life which keeps the atmosphere of the poem cool and sane. Such are the pictures of the hawk poising above the cliff ; of the slim-foliaged ash seen against the sky on a hill ; of the blossomed olive grown in a solitary place where a spring bubbles up, and it is blown by all the breezes and shimmers into silver ; of the woodman preparing his dinner in a dell 1 II. xiv. 392-401. 70 HOMER among the hills, or the gardener guiding runlets of water from a spring to ripple down over the trenched slopes of his garden-plot/ The invention of this class of ornament has been staled by use ; and it lends itself with horrid facility to the hands of the minor poet. But it was an invention of the first importance ; and it has never been used with greater tact and skill than in the Homeric poetry where it makes its first appearance. The effect of these spaces of cool air and quiet daylight in the composition is magical. One more instance may be quoted, not only for its own beauty of language but for the way in which it inter- laces the themes of the Iliad and Odyssey. On the voyage from Aeolia, just before Odysseus succumbs to sleep, outworn by superhuman watchings, " On the tenth day," he says, " the tilled fields of my native land came in sight, and now we were so near that we saw the kindling of fires." The same situation is used in the Iliad as a piece of rich ornament in the de- scription of the going forth of Achilles to battle. " As when over the sea there appears to sailors the bright- ness of a burning fire, that burns high among the hills in a lonely farm ; then storm -blasts bear them off unwilling over the sea, where the fishes go, far from their own people." The picture is the same, but the point of view is reversed.^ Not otherwise might a Tuscan or Umbrian painter of the fifteenth century, Piero di Cosimo or Pinturicchio, show, through a window in his picture, a background of sea with the 1 II. xiii. 60, 180, xvii. 53-6, xi. 8G-9, xxi. 257-62. 2 11. xix. 375-8 ; Od. x. 29, 30. THE HOMERIC TEMPER 71 ship of Odysseus and the points of fire on the dusking island. But it is neither by his epithets nor by his similes, nor by that kind of ornament which these two specific means of poetical effect represent, that a poet takes his rank, or that great poetry is created. For that we have to turn to a higher plane of thought and feeling. The saying that poetry is a criticism of life has this much of truth in it, that_ppetry:jdfipenda-on its grasp of life for. high, poetic - quality. It is,here that all generations have instinctively felt the greatness of the Homeric poems. Their whole view and handling of life, not as a mere pageant but as the arena of great energies, are unsurpassed in elevation and completeness. ^ In them human life is poised among vast spiritual forces, and glitters "like a jewel hung in ghastly night " against a dark background lit up by splendid courage, clear insight, unconquerable will. The spirit of man rises in them beyond circumstance, beyond divine control, even beyond fate. Only in the Northern Sagas (the ancestral epic of our own race as Homer was of the Greek) is man so great, and the moral effect ' of the poetry, as distinct from its moral lesson, from the specific truths to be drawn from it, so uplifting and so sustaining. In this sense the lines of Horace in which he sets Homer above the Greek philosophers express what is true of him as it is true of all the highest poetry. To this splendid energy of human life the Gods, " who live easily," take really a second place. When Zeus sits on the mountain summit '' rejoicing in his glory, looking on Troy town and the 72 HOMER Achaean ships," it is they and not he who are at the centre of the interest. The picture, at the end of Book I. of the IHad, of the day-long feast in Olympus, where the Muses sing to the viol of Apollo, is the implied background throughout to a foreground which gives the more impressive spectacle of earth, with its war and wandering, its burden of toil and trouble and death. The Homeric idealisation of life is not in any such golden world, above or below earth, in a conjec- tured future or a fabulous past, but in the actual deeds of men, so predestined and so accomplished that they become a song for times to be. ~~^ This unmatched power to express the sense of human greatness is what above all else makes Homer, in the phrase applied to him by a later Greek poet, '' the ageless mouth of the world." It is concentrated in such words as the famous " Forward " — 'loiJLev — of Sarpedon ; the '' Endure, heart," of Odysseus ; Hector's " One omen is best, to defend the fatherland." So, too, a whole criticism of life is concentrated in many passages that have become keywords for mankind : the words of Zeus in the prologue to the Odyssey, " Alas, how idly do mortals blame the Gods, saying that from us come their evils, while they themselves by their own infatuation have sorrows beyond what is ordained ; " or the lines that occur in both Iliad and Odyssey, " Howbeit hereafter shall he suffer whatsoever fate spun for him with the thread at birth, when his mother bore him ; " or the summing up of the joy of life in the words of Odysseus, " Better and fairer is nothing than this, when husband and wife keep house together HOMER AND LIFE 73 with one heart and mind between them, and they themselves know it best ; " or of its sorrow in those of Menelaus, " Of all things comes satiety, even of love and sleep and of sweet singing, though of these a man would sooner take his fill than of battle." -^ So it is, too, pre-eminently in two more passages: one the famous sentence of Glaucus, which has never lost its freshness or its piercing beauty through millionfold repetition : " Why enquire of my lineage ? Even as the generations of leaves are those of men : the leaves that be, them the wind scatters on earth, but the wood- land buds and puts forth more again when the season of spring comes on ; so of the generations of men one springs up and another passes away : " the other, per- haps the most remarkable of all, the words put in the mouth of Paris, as if to show that it is not always to the greatest of her children that life gives her largest wisdom : " Not to be thrown away are the gifts of the Gods, that they give unbidden, and no man may have them of his own choice." ^ Texts like these have become the commonplaces of thought, the stock-in-trade of secondary poets; like the epithet and the simile, the moral sentence convey- ing a light on the whole of life can be degraded until it fails to convey any meaning, or to be a mark for the ways of men. As with those ornaments it is our business to see them with our own eyes and feel them with our own senses, so it is our business with these to reconstitute them by our imagination as they were first 1 Od. i. 32-4 ; II xx. 127, 8 ; Od. vii. 197, 8, vi. 182-5 ; II. xiii. 636-9. 2 II. vi. 145-9, iii. 65, 6. 74 HOMER imagined. In each case let me take one concrete instance in order to illustrate and emphasise a meaning which, when stated in general terms, may itself become a mere commonplace. " A single epithet in Homer," says Mr. Butcher in his admirable Harvard lectures, " will often open up to us the very heart of the object." I take the first instance that comes to hand. The word XevKcoXevog, " white-armed," is one of the common Homeric epithets applied to womeru Many thousands of readers must have slipped over it as a mere indolent ornamental epithet, a piece of prettiness at the best, if not a tag to fill up the verse. How many are there who have paused long enough over it to consider what it means ? How many, even if they realised its mean- ing, have grasped what it implies ? The women of Homer are not the white-handed ladies of a literary convention, nor the creatures of a luxurious civilisation who toil not neither spin. Had Odysseus compli- mented Nausicaa as white-handed after her morning's work by the river, he would probably have moved her to some expression of that fresh humour with which later she imitates the talk of her vulgar townspeople. But let us take a passage from the most Homeric of English poets and flash it upon this single Homeric word. " My hands are burned," says the heroine in Mother and Son, By the lovely sun of the acres ; But lo, where the edge of the gown (So said thy father) is parting The wrist that is white as the curd From the brown of the hand that I love, Bright as the wing of a bird. ILLUMINATING ORNAMENT 75 The lines are little more than an expansion of the single Homeric epithet. It is charged with the whole aspect of a simpler and stronger life than our own. Under this fresh light the idle epithet has become a living and revealing word. Take again one of the developed similes in the Iliad, famous indeed but strangely misinterpreted by the commentators, and curiously overshadowed in general appreciation by another. That other, in the descrip- tion of the Trojan camp at night in the eighth book, is universally known ; it is the instance which has been used, ever since Wordsworth's Supplementary Preface to the Poems of 1815, for the purposes of criticism on the poetical diction of the eighteenth century, as represented by Pope's translation ; and the passage in which it occurs was chosen by Tennyson for an experiment in translation of his own. It may be noticed in passing that, apart from the larger ques- tion of style. Pope is to be excused if he failed to give a satisfactory rendering of a picture with which, in the original, something seems to have gone wrong. The passage to which I wish to draw attention, and of which, according to the modern critics, that in Book VIII. is an adaptation by a later poet, is in Book XVI. It is at a culminating point of the action. Patroclus, in the armour of Achilles, has come out to save the day where the battle is fiercest round the ship of Protesilaus. His first spear-cast strikes down a Paeonian captain. A thrill of horror runs through the whole Trojan ranks — klvrjOev Se (paXayyeg. For a minute they think that the son of Peleus himself is upon them, and 76 HOMER remain, as it were, frozen to the ground where they stand. Then they break in rout, and the roar of battle goes up again. That minute's awful pause is illuminated by an image which is unsurpassed both in its vivid truth and in its imaginative fitness — 0)9 ^' OT a(p' v\l/t]\rj^ Kopv " ^ marvellous creature." Me/uLiyjUiiva irvpi (pOeyyerat, " her utterance is mingled with fire," an ancient author says of Sappho, in one of those incidental remarks which often hit nearer the mark than formal criticism ; and it is curious to observe how constantly the metaphor of fire, in one form or another, recurs in all her eulogists. Yet it is inadequate and even misleading in what it suggests. In its ordinary acceptation it involves a misappre- hension of Sappho's central poetical quality. Nothing is more remarkable in her work than a quality which the epithet " fiery " in its customary use certainly does THE SAPPHIC LUSTRE 101 not imply — a quality of straightforward, lucid, un- adorned expression. Her fire is not a raging element ; it is a steady lustre which does not scorch or dazzle, the brilliance of which is only realised when, turning our eyes away from it to other poetry, we find that other poetry dim by comparison. Her fire is cool, like that of a gem. While it is true that, in the phrase I have already quoted, the purple of other poets seems to turn ashen- coloured when laid beside hers, there is no poet from whom the purple patch is more conspicuously absent. Only in the very greatest poets, and in these when they are at their best, do we find this inexplicable and overwhelming sim- plicity, the outcome of faultless instinct acting on elemental emotion. It is the ultimate magic of art. We read a few simple words simply put together ; we admire them and pass on; and then we find that there is some witchery in them that makes us go back, and again back, and yet again back, to make sure that we have not missed something, to try to find what it is in them that moves us so. We dilute and dilate them (the phrase is that of Swinburne in speaking of his own attempts to render the fragments of Sappho into English); we lavish our utmost resources on trying to express some mere fraction of the beauty we find in them; and in the end we find that we have merely blurred and confused what we have been trying to elucidate, that the magic and mystery still seem, as they seemed at first, just beyond our reach. This elusive magic, while it is a quality of all 102 THE LYRIC POETS Sappho's poetry, is found in its most obvious form where the passion of love is the subject of the poetry. It is this by which, to the ancient as well as the modern world, she has been chiefly known. The accident through which the only two fragments of her poetry that reach beyond half-a-dozen lines in length — the hymn to Aphrodite and the so-called ode to Anactoria — are concerned directly with this passion, has tended to confirm the current view. But the fragments show clearly that the range of her lyre was much wider; and whatever the subject, all bear the same translucent quality, comparable to that of water and air as much as that of fire. " Now I will sing to my fellow-women delightful things," so one of the fragments runs ; of the delightful things love was the first, but there were many others; and the Muses " who made me precious, giving me their own crafts," did not narrow their gift to the art of love.^ One passage, the text of which is unfortunately ruinous, speaks of " my joy in the light of the sun holding within it all things radiant and fair." ^ One is a speech of delicate self-abasement, spoken with the effect of a catch in the voice and tears behind the eyes : '' Surely I am not one of those who bear malice in their temper, but my heart is innocent." ^ One is a keen, swift flicker of woman's jealousy : " What country girl is this that bewitches your sense, one that does not know how to draw her skirts about her ankles ? " Another is a wail against ingratitude : " Those harm me most by whom I have done well." ^ 1 Fragg. 10, 11. - Frag. 79. ^ prag. 72. « Fragg. 70, 12. THINGS RADIANT AND FAIR 103 Of another we only know the substance as cited by Aristotle ; ^ but even so we may gather that it ex- pressed a profound reflection on human life in language of grave clear beauty : " Or as Sappho said, that death is evil ; for the Gods have so judged ; else they would have died." Many deal with the loveliness of nature, as seen in " an isle under Ionian skies " where, as Herodotus says, " the climate and seasons are the most beautiful of any cities in the world we know." These pictures are incomparably vivid : the orchard in summer where " on both sides cool water tinkles through apple- boughs, and slumber floats down from rustling leaves ; " the full moon shining, and the stars standing fixed as round an altar ; a cloud of sparrows descending through the air in a whirl of wings ; storm sweeping down the hill upon a roaring oakwood ; ^ or those exquisite lines, the best known I suppose of all her work, about the apple that reddens on a top branch, atop of the topmost, and the apple-gatherers forgot it, no, did not forget it, but could not reach it — oiov TO yXuKvjULoXop epevOerai aKpo) ctt' varScp, (XKpov ctt' CLKpOTCLTO), \e\dOovTO Se jULoXoSpoTTije^f ou juav eKXeXaOovT aXX' ovk eSvvavT eirLKearOai. This last passage is an instance of the way in which Sappho's poetry has been sophisticated by modern sentiment, just as in later Greece it was defaced by Athenian vulgarity. One hardly knows whether to be more grateful to Rossetti for his beautiful transla- 1 Rhetoric, ii. 23. 2 Fragg. 4, 53, 1, 42. 104 THE LYRIC POETS tion of these lines, or more annoyed with him for linking with them, and fixing in them almost irre- vocably, a sentiment which does not belong to them, nor to the almost equally beautiful passage which they suggested to Catullus. It is one of the many instances which go to prove that poetry is untrans- lateable, because what the translator reproduces is not the original itself, but the original as limited by, or extended over, the emotional effect produced by it on his own mind. Now with the Greek lyrists, and with Sappho pre- eminently, this emotional effect is so powerful that in translating it, as in criticising it, one almost inevitably not only dilates and dilutes but distorts it. Listen to the gorgeous rhetoric of Swinburne's Anactoria — Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine Except these kisses of my lips on thine Brand them with immortality ; but me — Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown — But in the light and laughter, in the moan And music, and in grasp of lip and hand And shudder of water that makes felt on land The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, Memories shall mix and metaphors of me. The secondary emotion in these lines is perfectly genuine ; but it is secondary. The instinct is followed ; but the instinct is not perfectly sound. MvaaeaQal Tiva (j)afxi KOI varrepov a/jLixetav are the words of Sappho MUSIC OF THE SPHERES 105 herself : " I say that one shall remember me even after- ward." ^ That one low, pellucid phrase is all. Or take Swinburne again — for when he wrote his Anactoria he was little more than a boy — coming with trained power of expression and matured judg- ment to Sappho once more, coming as close to her as he can — / loved thee — hark, one tenderer note than all — Atthis, of old time once — one low long fall Sighing — one long low lovely loveless call Dying — one pause in song so flamelike fast — Atthis, long since in old time overpast — One soft first pause and last. The emotion is not perhaps so real, but the in- stinct for expression is much truer. Yet how far and far away still from the Greek, how indistinct by comparison ! "'Jipdjuiav /mep eyw a-eOev, "ArOi, irdXai TTora, " I loved you once, Atthis " ^ — just one sliding sigh and whisper of sound. Only one English poet has known the secret of this melody. — But what music ? — My lord, I hear none. —None ? The music of the spheres. That might be said, I think, about Sappho : and it is said as Sappho might have said it. To antiquity Sappho was " the poetess " as Homer was " the poet." She still remains so. Many women have written poetry, and some have written poetry of high merit and extreme beauty. But no other woman can claim an assured place in the first rank of poets. 1 Frag. 32. 2 prag. 33. 106 THE LYEIC POETS Among the Greek lyrists are the names of some half- dozen women who came in the catalogue of the lyric poets, howbeit they attained not unto the Nine : Corinna of Tanagra, the rival of Pindar and one of his most acute critics ; Murtis of Anthedon and Telesilla of Argos ; Erinna, that fascinating and elusive figure who somewhere and at some time — as to her country and her date all is uncertainty — died at nine- teen, an inheritress of unfulfilled renown. Of these as of their successors in other ages and countries no one has stood by the side of the great Lesbian — ovS^ 'lav SoKLjiioijULi TrpocrlSoKrap (pdog aXlco e(T(T€a-6ai (Tocblav irapOevov eig ovSeva iroo yjiovov TOiavTav. " Into all time I think no maiden that looks on the light of the sun shall be such in wisdom." ^ It is not, to be sure, of herself that Sappho says this ; though when every fragment in which a pronoun of the first person occurs is tortured into a piece of auto- biography, this one might be thrown in with as much reason as others. For the quality of a-ocpla, " wisdom " — something that includes the more precise notions of culture, insight, and balance — is as characteristic of this marvellous creature as her flame-like passion and her faultless language. It was by this gift among the rest that the Muses made her precious. One famous passage is a condemnation to oblivion of some one — "an uneducated woman," says the collector who has preserved the lines — for lack of the wisdom that makes 1 Frag. 69. ROSES OF PIERIA 107 remembrance outlive death. ^'Sometime thou shalt lie dead, and no memory of thee shall be either then or afterward, for thou hast no part in roses from Pieria ; but even in the chambers of Death thou shalt pass unknown flitting forth among the dim ghosts." That is the bare colourless English of her own gorgeously modulated choriambics — KarOdvoicra Se Kelareai Trora, kcov /uLvajULoa-vpa creOev ecrareT ovre tot ovt^ ua-TCpov, ov yap ireSe-^eig /SpoScou Twv €K Tltepia^, aXX' acpdvtjg kvjv 'A'lSa So/uloi? (pOiTCLoreig Tre^' djULavpcov vckvcov eKireTroTajuieva} In these lines we may see clearly the high intellec- tual passion which is as remarkable in Sappho's work as the more sensuous passion through which she has her unique fame. The Love whom she saw, cXOovt e^ opavcD TTopcpvpiav irepdejj.evov ^Xa/xui/, " descending from heaven clad in purple vesture," ^ is akin to the intellec- tual and spiritual love of Plato and of Dante. Among the most beautiful of Provencal poems is an alba by a poetess of unknown name which might have been written by one of the scholars of Sappho. It is best known by its lovely and haunting refrain, the Oy dieus ! oy dieus ! de 1' alba tan tost ve ! which has something of the simplicity and poignancy of a line of Sappho's own. But the whole piece, though in a lower key and with far less accomplished workman- ship, recalls that fresh early lyric impulse of the Aeolian poets. It has not the splendour and inevitableness of 1 Frag. 68. 2 prag. 64. 108 THE LYRIC POETS its Greek prototype, but it has a similar delicacy and sweetness, " la doss' aura qu' es venguda de lay." En uii vergier sotz fuelha d' albespi Tenc la dompna son amic costa si. Plagues a dieu ja la nueitz non falhis Ni '1 mieus amicx lone de mi no s partis. Bels dous amicx, fassam un joe novel Ins el jardi on ehanton li auzel. La dompna es agradans e plazens ; Per sa beautat la garden mantas gens. " In an orchard, under the hawthorn leaf, the lady holds her lover close to her. Might it please God the night would never wane, nor my love separate far from me. Fair sweet love, let us renew delight, in the garden where the birds sing. The lady is gracious and pleasant ; many people regard her for her beauty. Ah, God ! ah, God ! the dawn fleets so soon ! " The analogies between the two civilisations and the two poetries which they produced as their flower are more than superficial and are in some ways wonderfully close. In both we have a cultured and very likely a dissolute governing class ; a freedom allowed to women in life and speech which scandalised the rest of the world ; poetry and music seriously studied by organised schools or guilds. The hetairiai of Lesbos, associations of women for the cultivation of poetry and music, have their nearest parallel in those Courts of Love which existed in Languedoc from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. We have lists of a number of these: the beautiful names, Elys, Beatrix, H^leine, Ermengarde, Azalais, are like those of Sappho's associates, Atthis LESBOS AND PROVENCE 109 and Andromeda, Cle'is and Anactoria and Gyrinno. Among them one, Estephanette de Gantelmes, is named as having had a prominent place, and a reputa- tion in poetry something like Sappho's. " II est vray," says Jean de Nostredame, quoting as his authority some one called the Monk of the Islands of Gold, " que Phanette ou Estephanette, comme tres excellente en la po^sie, avoit una fureur, ou inspiration divine, laquelle estoit estim^e un vray don de Dieu." ^ It may not -be irrelevant to quote what Raynouard says, in his classical work on the Troubadour literature, as to the scope and influence of the lyric poetry of Provence, for much of it is strikingly applicable to the earlier Ijrric of Hellas. After tracing the develop- ment of the Romance language, the kolpyj or common literary dialect of the western Mediterranean : " sub- jected," as he says, "to new combinations of poetry and versification, it was devoted by the Troubadours to expressing the delicacy and liveliness of love, the uncompromising outspokenness (la severe franchise) of their moral and political opinions, their enthusiasm for noble deeds and for the illustrious persons who wrought them, their just and bold indignation against the errors and faults of their contemporaries ; and then a new literature began." "When we have studied" Raynouard adds, "and appreciated the substance and form of these com- ^ Vies des plus ceUhres et anciens poHes provengauXf 1575: cited by Raynouard, Choix des Poesies des Troubadours, vol. ii. p. xciv. foil. According to Nostredame, this Phanette was the aunt of the Laurette de Sade whom he identifies with Petrarch's Laura. But even Sade {Memoires pour la vie de Petrarque) had to admit reluctantly that Nostre- dame was an " auteur trop fabuleux." 110 THE LYRIC POETS positions, we must allow to these poets the talent and the glory of having created an independent kind of poetry, which has become for part of Europe the characteristic and fertile type of the beauties of feeling, imagery and expression." But Provence, while it produced much lyric poetry of great delicacy and charm, does not seem ever to have produced a great lyric poet: and in the lyric even more than in other forms of poetry, the difference is vital between what is first-rate and what falls short of being first-rate. Its perfection depends on the finest balance between qualities which are always tending to pull against one another : finish of style and direct expression of feeling. In Sappho we have the finished style, the yXacpvpo^ xapaKrrip of the Greek critics, to a degree in which they held her to excel all other lyric poets. Opinion may be divided as to this ; but if not unequalled, she is at least unsurpassed in this quality. Alcaeus among her contemporaries, Ibycus among her successors, perhaps reach the same level, but so far as can be judged from the fragments, they do not apply their style to any material with the same unfaltering certainty. Early in the fifth cen- tury B.C. the secret of the style became lost. The well-worn comparison of the nightingale, so constantly and inevitably applied to Sappho and her poetry, has a real value if it is not carelessly used. From these miraculous lines in the Odyssey, already quoted — ft)? ^' ore TlavSapeov Kovpr} "^loprjtg af]Siii)P KaXov aelSrja-iv eapo^ veov LcrTa/ULevoio — THE NIGHTINGALE-NOTE 111 Even as when the maid of Pandarus, The greenwood nightingale melodious, Amid the thickened leafage sits and sings When the young spring is waxing over us ; And she with many a note and hurrying trill Pours forth her liquid voice, lamenting still Her own son Itylus, King Zethus' child. Whom long ago her folly made her kill — which are in fact a lyric fragment embedded in the epic structure, down to Keats's immortal ode, the dis- tance is great. In the one we have the bird's song with all its flexible sweetness, profusion, unselfcon- sciousness ; in the other we hear it through an atmos- phere charged with thought, with romance, with the passion and mystery of life. In Sappho it is different from both. The nightingale-note with her is not so much the rapture that " feeds the heart of the night with fire," the passionate thronging of notes and the triumphant burst of song, as that low inward contralto which is beyond the reach of any other singer, and in its liquid piercing sweetness is by itself and alone. Sometimes it is tremulous as if it floated on an ebb of passion, like the voice of one who has sought and not found, and still seeks and is not satisfied : the Ich liebe eine Blume, dock weiss ich nicht welche of Heine. Die Nachtigall schlagt, und ich verstehe Den siissen Gesang. Uns beiden ist so bang und wehe, So weh und bang. Sometimes it is simply clear and passionless ; and here it is that Sappho reaches the absolute summit of the lyric. ' AiTrapOevog ea-a-ojuiai, " Maiden shall I be for 112 THE LYRIC POETS ever " ^ : just these two words in their liquid beauty, their simple purity, might be the final epitaph on a poetry which with all its swift ardour and flame-like passion is at its inmost heart grave, delicate, almost virginally austere. It is this note that sounds in the two lines preserved from her last poem, addressed to her daughter from her death-bed — aW ov yap Oe/mig ev fJiOLcroiroXw oIklo. Op^vov ejujULevai ' ovk cljuljull irpeirei TaSe. " It is not right that there be mourning in the house of poetry ; this befits not us." ^ Into this grave, still music the fire and splendour of passion, the richness and beauty of song, have become absorbed and trans- muted. It is the last note of the Muse of Lesbos. 1 Frag. 96. « Yiag. 136. II THE AGE OF CONCENTRATION: SIMONIDES In the later part of the sixth century B.C. a great change passed over Hellas. It put away childish things ; the lovely, irresponsible period of adolescence was over. Under the pressure of a great world - movement in which it was the centre and the battle- ground, it drew itself together intellectually, knitted its nerves, concentrated and hardened. We see the Hellenic spirit no longer as that of a delicate maiden gathering flowers — apOe' aixepyovcrav iraiS' ayav airaXav ^ — but rather like one of the awful figures of Michael Angelo, massive and brooding, tortured by an in- satiable curiosity and a fierce desire of perfection. Greek poetry had still to make what are possibly its greatest achievements, but it made them through minds overburdened with thought, and eyes at once restless and piercing, which searched deep into the profound mysteries of life. In this poetry of fully developed Hellas the brain counts for more, the instinct for less. Sparta was becoming brutalised, and poetry there dwindled away. The large diffused Ionian culture narrowed upon Athens. The demand of the 1 Sappho, frag. 121. 113 „ 114 THE LYRIC POETS modern spirit was for action, and again action, and always action. The drama arose, and merged into itself the intellectualised elements of the lyric, on the larger plane towards which men's minds had been drawn by the rediscovery or reinstatement of the epic. Poetry ceased to be the natural flower of life : it became a weapon, exquisitely fine and keen, wielding the resources of a hitherto unknown science, and attempting, not without success, to become the imaginative function of a life tense, complex, and active beyond all previous experience. Into this period fall the names of the last among the nine lyric poets of the canoui Between the birth of Simonides and the death of Pindar there is an interval of about one hundred years. Simonides, belonging by date of birth to an earlier generation, that of the island-poets who gathered from all quarters of the Hellenic world to the brilliant literary court of Samos, attained a great age, and wrote much of his finest poetry after the Persian wars. Pindar, born some forty years later, lived on to the time at which the Athenian empire began to break up. Bacchylides, the nephew of Simonides and the rival of Pindar, brings the series of the great lyric poets to a close just after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war. In this century, full of cross-currents and complex developments, it is not easy to trace any central clue, still less to fix any central figure in poetry. We seem to be watching not so much a steady movement of sunlight while the earth swings round upon her axis, as an electric storm full of flashes and sparkles, flame SIMONIDES AND PINDAR 115 leaping suddenly from one point to another and as suddenly extinct. There is indeed one remarkable figure whom it is impossible to pass over, even apart from the fact that we possess a fully representative body of his poetry. Pindar was unanimously placed by Greek judgment at the head of the lyric poets, and this estimate was con- firmed by the lucid and unbiassed criticism of Quin- tilian. But he can hardly be called the central figure of his period. The only one of the nine who belongs to Greece Proper, he is in a way less Greek than the rest. He differs from all his contemporaries in seeming not to belong to his age. He is the one great poet produced by Thebes; and Thebes, then as always, stood curiously outside of Hellas. The separatist atti- tude taken up by Boeotia in the Persian wars is only the most incisive instance of an aloofness of temper which characterises it from first to last. Just as Thebes gives the feeling of being somehow outside of Hellas, Pindar gives the feeling of being somehow out- side of Hellenic poetry. The finest modern critics are inconclusive about him ; they praise him and make sudden reservations ; they repeat one another, some- times, as it would seem, mechanically and without full conviction. This is because, consciously or not, they are baffled by him. Under analysis, he becomes a mere string of contradictions. He is the most religious of the Greek poets; he was accepted as inspired by Delphi, and here and there gives utterance, in language of unexampled splendour, to the deepest religious emotions ; yet his odes give the impression of one who 116 THE LYRIC POETS worships nothing but worldly success and fame, unless it be high birth. He is a master of language, who seems to write whatever comes into his head. He affects us with an almost speechless admiration, and then, in a moment, leaves us floundering in a maze of tortured language about things that do not interest us. " Few people care for Pindar now," says Professor Murray in a single sharp sentence. It may be doubted whether many people ever cared for him, any more than he cared for them. Tendit in altos nubium tr actus, says Horace of him ; and indeed there is something about him meteoric, as of one whose poetry is barely human. At one moment, borne on by the rush of his language, we feel as if there was never any poetry like it ; at another, we are merely dazzled and fatigued, and the impression he gives in the original (as he almost uniformly does in a translation) is of something grotesque and almost monstrous. The momentum of his poetry is perhaps unequalled. The science of his art never fails him. He handles great rhythmical masses with absolute mastery and precision. The lifting movement and great crash of sound in his odes are almost incredible in their magnitude ; his instru- ment is an organ with all the stops out. But we ache in this whirl of sound for the vox humana, or a phrase of the lovely flute-stop that goes straight to the heart. Of Pindar, then, as of few poets, it may be said that there is to him nil simile aut secundum. A personality so constituted never recurred, and all attempts to imitate it are foredoomed failures. He was created to show what might be done in art and not done a second THE THEBAN EAGLE 117 time. One might perhaps without being over-fanciful draw an analogy between him and the only other great figure in the history of Thebes. Her two imperishable names are those of Pindar and Epaminondas. The two men came at times when the art of lyric poetry and the art of warfare had been developed and reduced to system ; they revolutionised the practice of their arts by daring genius, that upset all established ideas. Take one of Pindar's great crashing phrases — one like the incomparable €K S' ap avTOv iroiJ.(^oKv^av SaKpva yrjpaKecov yXecjydpcov dv ire pi y^v^av eirel ydOrja-ev e^alperoi/ yovov iSiidv KoXXia-TOv dvSpcov, I must reluctantly make an exception here to my rule of translating any Greek that I quote ; for the essence of a phrase like this is just that it is untranslateable : the volume and splendour of sound in it are the poetry. Its impact is as irresistible as that of the wedged column of fifty shields in depth that rammed the flower of the Spartan army to wreck at Leuctra. But Leuctra set no fashion of tactics, and Pindar set no fashion of poetry ; both remain dazzling and lonely achievements. A generation after Epaminondas, the art of war was put on a different footing by Alexander. Within Pindar's own lifetime, the central life of poetry passed away from the lyric. When the Theban general lay with the spear-head in his breast at Mantineia and was told that the wound was mortal, " Then," he said, **you must make peace." Pindar's last word might 118 THE LYRIC POETS have been similar: ''Then you must close the roll of the lyric poets." There was nothing else to be done : TO TTOpcra) S' ecTTi crov, " Things of a day, what are we and what are we not ? The dream of a shadow is humankind ; yet when a god- given splendour falls, light shines radiant upon men and life is sweet." ^ So he says at a thrilling height of rapt emotion; and then, apparently with the same thrill, he will speak of a horse-race or a dinner-party as though these things too were at the heart of life. Above all, we miss in him tears and laughter ; all the common and dear emotions are left untouched by him, and seemingly left him untouched. He is one of those great poets — they include some of the greatest — who are without love and without pity. The qualities which are absent in Pindar are just those which are conspicuous in Simonides. If not the greatest among the Greek lyrists — and in certain specific 1 Pyth. viii. 95-7. #' THE TEMPERED LYRIC 121 lyrical qualities five at least out of the nine may claim to excel him — he is the most broadly and nobly Hellenic. He is distinguished beyond all the rest by Greek refinement. All his work has a tempered dignity and suavity, combined with that specific quality of tenderness which makes him a spirit akin to Virgil. His genius seems to have been one of those which mature slowly and require length of life for their full development. In this respect he presents an interesting parallel with Sophocles. Both lived into their ninetieth year, and both did their finest work in poetry after an age at which the springs of poetry have in most men run dry. Both represent, more fully than any other among the generations of poets with whom they were contemporary, the whole life and pro- gress of poetry during their own age; and the one hundred and fifty years over which their joint lives extend are a period which, taking it for all in all, is the most wonderful in human history. Both give in poetry the Hellenic temper at its finest and fullest; its sanity, its culture, its patriotism, its large, grave, temperate handling of life. To both the double-edged epithet of faultless may be attached without implying the note of depreciation which the word often is meant to convey. Simonides is the last of the great island poets. Ionian culture is now flooding back to concentrate in Athens. The brilliant constellation of the Lesbian and Samian poets had set. Ceos, his birthplace, is only divided by a few miles of sea from Sunium, and is almost an outlying fragment of Attica. The Asiatic 122 THE LYKIC POETS influences which helped to mould the civilisation of the larger and richer islands off the Ionian coast did not reach over to it ; it breathed the thin clear air of Greece. Alone among the Cyclades, Ceos sent its little fleet, two triremes and two fifty-oared galleys, to fight against the Persians at Artemisium. According to legend, it was the fragment of a larger island, four- fifths of which had sunk under the sea, and a touch of mystery and sanctity still clung about it. Poetry and music were hereditary arts in the family of Simonides. It was as a trained poet of recognised dis- tinction that he left his native island for the court of the Peisistratids. The rest of his life was mainly spent at Athens. There was an interlude of some years in Thessaly, spent among the castles of the feudal nobility; and the last years of his old age were passed at Syracuse, where the splendid court of Hiero welcomed him, to- gether with Pindar and Aeschylus. But broadly speak- ing, we may call him not only the link between Ionia and Athens, but the first of the great Athenian poets. In what survives of his lyrics likewise we feel already the specific Athenian tone. They have the quality which made Athens, from the time of the Persian wars onward, the heart and brain of the Greek world, " the Hellas of Hellas " in the striking phrase attri- buted to Thucydides. In becoming Athenian, Greek poetry both gained and lost. But both in the loss and in the gain it became more intensely Greek. It parted finally with romance. The piercing sweetness of the earlier lyric passed away : its lovely childishness and delicate magic were not for that age of dust THE NARROW WAY 123 and sweat. Political and ethical thought were filling three-fourths of life. The human intellect was for the first time feeling and exercising all its powers. Poetry answered to the demands of life ; it became intellect- ualised; it grew fine, a little hard, like a stripped athlete trained down to the last ounce : when at its best, it is a miracle ; missing its best, if but by the difference of a hair-breadth, it is hardly poetry at all. The invention of prose had the effect on poetry not only of delimiting its province, but of laying on it new, stringent, and it might almost seem impossible require- ments. Just at the time when it was becoming more and more a vehicle of thought, it found itself faced by and forced into rivalry with a new art designed to express thought directly. The demand was made of it, while remaining poetry, to do the work of prose. It did this ; but at a great cost. On the one hand, it ran the con- stant risk of becoming prosaic. In the effort to save itself from this danger it incurred another, that of being consciously and artificially poetical. AeTrra S' arapTTog', vrjXerjg S* avajKa ' el Se Xeyei T19 aAXco?, irXareia KeXevOog — " Narrow is the path, merciless the necessity, but broad is the road for him who speaks amiss." ^ Simonides treads that narrow path with a sure foot, Pindar (if the traditional interpretation of his words is correct) spoke with contempt of his rival's poetry as an art that could be learned, as uninspired and mechanical. The same criticism has been made on the Odes of Horace. It will be time enough to con- sider its relevance when the mechanism has been 1 Alcman, frag. 81 ; Bacchylides, frag. 37. 124 THE LYRIC POETS mastered, when any one learns, or can teach, the art of producing poetry like theirs. At whatever point we draw the line between art and inspiration, the grave beauty and noble tenderness of Simonides, even more than his faultless grace and finish, are what give him his place among the master-poets. That place indeed has, but for the attack of Pindar, never been seriously challenged. His reputation in his own lifetime was immense and almost universal. The very mythology which grew round his name, as it did round those of all the great poets, took a colour from the quality of his genius. The legends about Pmdar are fantastic and extravagant: bees swarmed about his lips at Thespiae ; he heard the god Pan sing- ing one of his own hymns. Those about Simonides have a peculiar refinement and gravity like his own grave and refined poetry. He lived under a special divine care and guardianship. I find it written of Simonides, That, travelling in strange countries, once he found A corpse that lay exposed upon the ground. For which, with pains, he caused due obsequies To be performed, and paid all holy fees. Soon after this man's ghost unto him came, And told him not to sail, as was his aim. On board a ship then ready for the seas. Simonides, admonished by the ghost, Remained behind : the ship the following day Set sail, was wrecked, and all on board were lost. Thus was the tenderest Poet that could be, Who sang in ancient Greece his moving lay, Saved out of many by his piety. So Wordsworth wrote, at the time which was the culminating period of his poetry. I have quoted the THE TOUCH OF AUTUMN 125 sonnet in full, partly because the authentic text of 1803 has never hitherto been correctly reprinted, but also because it shows, even better than other more widely known passages, the strong attraction that the one poet exercised over the other ; and because, like a good deal of Wordsworth's finest work, it is written in something very near to the Simonidean manner. In both there is the same simple gravity and delicacy, the same absence of any apparent effort, the same lucid straightforwardness that is almost like that of prose — " like, but ah, how different ! " But the Greek Wordsworth, more fortunate than his English successor, carried the divine favour through life. His fame was not deferred to his old age; and in his old age the stream of poetry still issued with the same limpid melody, the same clear beauty. Yet as he outlived his own generation, so he out- lived the summer-time of the Greek lyric. In the still beauty of some of the fragments there is an autumnal quality, as of one of those golden days that carry the first message of the year's decay. "Who that is wise in mind," he says, " would praise Cleobulus the dweller in Lindus, who set the might of a pillar in rivalry with the ever-flowing rivers, and the spring flowers, and the golden flame of the sun and the shining moon and the eddies of the sea ? For all things are subject to the Gods ; and as for a stone, even the hands of mortals shatter it. Behold here the thought of a foolish man."^ Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful 1 Frag. 57. 126 THE LYRIC POETS rhyme ; but to poetry also, as to the monument, decay comes in the end ; the hands of mortals, as they have built it up, pull it down, and all things are subject to the Gods. In the poetry of Simonides there is that settled perfection at which poetry only stays for a little while before she girds herself for a fresh journey. 'A Moiara eirep-^erai iravTa OepiCpfjieva, as he says in an- other passage ; tJ-ri jmoi KaTairavere — " The Muse moves onward, gathering all things to her harvest ; prithee stay her not." ^ Stay her not ; no, the attempt would be idle, for she will not stay. He more than once takes the tone of a poet of the older generation, looking with doubtful eyes on the new art, the work of younger and slighter poets. It had not the old potency : Kovpcov S^ e^eXey^^ei veo