My reason for asking the reader to give so much of his time to the
examination of the pathetic fallacy was, that, whether in literature
or in art, he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern
mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also
find the modern painter endeavouring to express something which he, as
a living creature imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical
and mediæval painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and
actual qualities of the object itself. It will be observed that,
according to the principle stated long ago, I use the words painter
and poet quite indifferently, including in our inquiry the landscape
of literature, as well as that of painting; and this the more because
the spirit of classical landscape has hardly been expressed in any
other way than by words.
Taking, therefore, this wide field, it is surely a very notable
circumstance, to begin with, that this pathetic fallacy is eminently
characteristic of modern painting. For instance, Keats, describing a
wave breaking out at sea, says of it:--
Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.[74]
That is quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner. The idea
of the peculiar action with which foam rolls down a long, large wave
could not have been given by any other words so well as by this
"wayward indolence." But Homer would never have written, never thought
of, such words. He could not by any possibility have lost sight of
the great fact that the wave, from the beginning to the end of it, do
what it might, was still nothing else than salt water; and that salt
water could not be either wayward or indolent. He will call the
waves "over-roofed," "full-charged," "monstrous," "compact-black,"
"dark-clear," "violet-coloured," "wine-coloured," and so on. But
every one of these epithets is descriptive of pure physical nature.
"Over-roofed" is the term he invariably uses of anything--rock, house,
or wave--that nods over at the brow; the other terms need no
explanation; they are as accurate and intense in truth as words can
be, but they never show the slightest feeling of anything animated in
the ocean. Black or clear, monstrous or violet-coloured, cold salt
water it is always, and nothing but that.
"Well, but the modern writer, by his admission of the tinge of
fallacy, has given an idea of something in the action of the wave
which Homer could not, and surely, therefore, has made a step in
advance? Also there appears to be a degree of sympathy and feeling in
the one writer, which there is not in the other; and as it has been
received for a first principle that writers are great in, proportion
to the intensity of their feelings, and Homer seems to have no
feelings about the sea but that it is black and deep, surely in this
respect also the modern writer is the greater?"
Stay a moment. Homer _had_ some feeling about the sea; a faith in the
animation of it much stronger than Keats's. But all this sense of
something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract
image of a Sea Power. He never says the waves rage, or the waves are
idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves,
which rages, and is idle, and _that_ he calls a god.
I do not think we ever enough endeavour to enter into what a Greek's
real notion of a god was. We are so accustomed to the modern mockeries
of the classical religion, so accustomed to hear and see the Greek
gods introduced as living personages, or invoked for help, by men who
believe neither in them nor in any other gods, that we seem to have
infected the Greek ages themselves with the breath, and dimmed them
with the shade, of our hypocrisy; and are apt to think that Homer, as
we know that Pope, was merely an ingenious fabulist; nay, more than
this, that all the nations of past time were ingenious fabulists also,
to whom the universe was a lyrical drama, and by whom whatsoever was
said about it was merely a witty allegory, or a graceful lie, of which
the entire upshot and consummation was a pretty statue in the middle
of the court, or at the end of the garden.
This, at least, is one of our forms of opinion about Greek faith; not,
indeed, possible altogether to any man of honesty or ordinary powers
of thought; but still so venomously inherent in the modern philosophy
that all the pure lightning of Carlyle cannot as yet quite burn it out
of any of us. And then, side by side with this mere infidel folly,
stands the bitter short-sightedness of Puritanism, holding the
classical god to be either simply an idol,--a block of stone
ignorantly, though sincerely, worshipped--or else an actual diabolic
or betraying power, usurping the place of God.
Both these Puritanical estimates of Greek deity are of course to some
extent true. The corruption of classical worship is barren idolatry;
and that corruption was deepened, and variously directed to their own
purposes, by the evil angels. But this was neither the whole, nor the
principal part, of Pagan worship. Pallas was not, in the pure Greek
mind, merely a powerful piece of ivory in a temple at Athens; neither
was the choice of Leonidas between the alternatives granted him by the
oracle, of personal death, or ruin to his country, altogether a work
of the Devil's prompting.
What, then, was actually the Greek god? In what way were these two
ideas of human form, and divine power, credibly associated in the
ancient heart, so as to become a subject of true faith irrespective
equally of fable, allegory, superstitious trust in stone, and
demoniacal influence?
It seems to me that the Greek had exactly the same instinctive feeling
about the elements that we have ourselves; that to Homer, as much as
to Casimir de la Vigne,[75] fire seemed ravenous and pitiless; to
Homer, as much as to Keats, the sea-wave appeared wayward or idle, or
whatever else it may be to the poetical passion. But then the Greek
reasoned upon this sensation, saying to himself: "I can light the
fire, and put it out; I can dry this water up, or drink it. It cannot
be the fire or the water that rages, or that is wayward. But it must
be something _in_ this fire and _in_ the water, which I cannot destroy
by extinguishing the one, or evaporating the other, any more than I
destroy myself by cutting off my finger; _I_ was _in_ my
finger,--something of me at least was; I had a power over it and felt
pain in it, though I am still as much myself when it is gone. So there
may be a power in the water which is not water, but to which the water
is as a body;--which can strike with it, move in it, suffer in it, yet
not be destroyed with it. This something, this Great Water Spirit, I
must not confuse with the waves, which are only its body. _They_ may
flow hither and thither, increase or diminish. _That_ must be
invisible--imperishable--a god. So of fire also; those rays which I
can stop, and in the midst of which I cast a shadow, cannot be divine,
nor greater than I. They cannot feel, but there may be something in
them that feels,--a glorious intelligence, as much nobler and more
swift than mine, as these rays, which are its body, are nobler and
swifter than my flesh;--the spirit of all light, and truth, and
melody, and revolving hours."
It was easy to conceive, farther, that such spirits should be able to
assume at will a human form, in order to hold intercourse with men, or
to perform any act for which their proper body, whether of fire,
earth, or air, was unfitted. And it would have been to place them
beneath, instead of above, humanity, if, assuming the form of man,
they could not also have tasted his pleasures. Hence the easy step to
the more or less material ideas of deities, which are apt at first to
shock us, but which are indeed only dishonourable so far as they
represent the gods as false and unholy. It is not the materialism, but
the vice, which degrades the conception; for the materialism itself is
never positive or complete. There is always some sense of exaltation
in the spiritual and immortal body; and of a power proceeding from the
visible form through all the infinity of the element ruled by the
particular god. The precise nature of the idea is well seen in the
passage of the _Iliad_ which describes the river Scamander defending
the Trojans against Achilles.[76] In order to remonstrate with the
hero, the god assumes a human form, which nevertheless is in some way
or other instantly recognized by Achilles as that of the river-god: it
is addressed at once as a river, not as a man; and its voice is the
voice of a river "out of the deep whirlpools."[77] Achilles refuses to
obey its commands; and from the human form it returns instantly into
its natural or divine one, and endeavours to overwhelm him with waves.
Vulcan defends Achilles, and sends fire against the river, which
suffers in its water-body, till it is able to bear no more. At last
even the "nerve of the river," or "strength of the river" (note the
expression), feels the fire, and this "strength of the river"
addresses Vulcan in supplications for respite. There is in this
precisely the idea of a vital part of the river-body, which acted and
felt, and which, if the fire reached, it was death, just as would be
the case if it touched a vital part of the human body. Throughout the
passage the manner of conception is perfectly clear and consistent;
and if, in other places, the exact connection between the ruling
spirit and the thing ruled is not so manifest, it is only because it
is almost impossible for the human mind to dwell long upon such
subjects without falling into inconsistencies, and gradually
slackening its effort to grasp the entire truth; until the more
spiritual part of it slips from its hold, and only the human form of
the god is left, to be conceived and described as subject to all the
errors of humanity. But I do not believe that the idea ever weakens
itself down to mere allegory. When Pallas is said to attack and strike
down Mars, it does not mean merely that Wisdom at that moment
prevailed against Wrath. It means that there are, indeed, two great
spirits, one entrusted to guide the human soul to wisdom and chastity,
the other to kindle wrath and prompt to battle. It means that these
two spirits, on the spot where, and at the moment when, a great
contest was to be decided between all that they each governed in man,
then and there (assumed) human form, and human weapons, and did verily
and materially strike at each other, until the Spirit of Wrath was
crushed. And when Diana is said to hunt with her nymphs in the woods,
it does not mean merely, as Wordsworth puts it,[78] that the poet or
shepherd saw the moon and stars glancing between the branches of the
trees, and wished to say so figuratively. It means that there is a
living spirit, to which the light of the moon is a body; which takes
delight in glancing between the clouds and following the wild beasts
as they wander through the night; and that this spirit sometimes
assumes a perfect human form, and in this form, with real arrows,
pursues and slays the wild beasts, which with its mere arrows of
moonlight it could not slay; retaining, nevertheless, all the while,
its power and being in the moonlight, and in all else that it
rules.
There is not the smallest inconsistency or unspirituality in this
conception. If there were, it would attach equally to the appearance
of the angels to Jacob, Abraham, Joshua, or Manoah.[79] In all those
instances the highest authority which governs our own faith requires
us to conceive divine power clothed with a human form (a form so real
that it is recognized for superhuman only by its "doing wondrously"),
and retaining, nevertheless, sovereignty and omnipresence in all the
world. This is precisely, as I understand it, the heathen idea of a
God; and it is impossible to comprehend any single part of the Greek
mind until we grasp this faithfully, not endeavouring to explain it
away in any wise, but accepting, with frank decision and definition,
the tangible existence of its deities;--blue-eyed--white-fleshed--
human-hearted,--capable at their choice of meeting man absolutely in
his own nature--feasting with him--talking with him--fighting with
him, eye to eye, or breast to breast, as Mars with Diomed;[80] or else,
dealing with him in a more retired spirituality, as Apollo sending the
plague upon the Greeks,[81] when his quiver rattles at his shoulders as
he moves, and yet the darts sent forth of it strike not as arrows, but
as plague; or, finally, retiring completely into the material universe
which they properly inhabit, and dealing with man through that, as
Scamander with Achilles, through his waves.
Nor is there anything whatever in the various actions recorded of the
gods, however apparently ignoble, to indicate weakness of belief in
them. Very frequently things which appear to us ignoble are merely the
simplicities of a pure and truthful age. When Juno beats Diana about
the ears with her own quiver,[82] for instance, we start at first, as
if Homer could not have believed that they were both real goddesses.
But what should Juno have done? Killed Diana with a look? Nay, she
neither wished to do so, nor could she have done so, by the very faith
of Diana's goddess-ship. Diana is as immortal as herself. Frowned
Diana into submission? But Diana has come expressly to try conclusions
with her, and will by no means be frowned into submission. Wounded her
with a celestial lance? That sounds more poetical, but it is in
reality partly more savage and partly more absurd, than Homer. More
savage, for it makes Juno more cruel, therefore less divine; and more
absurd, for it only seems elevated in tone, because we use the word
"celestial," which means nothing. What sort of a thing is a "celestial"
lance? Not a wooden one. Of what then? Of moonbeams, or clouds, or
mist. Well, therefore, Diana's arrows were of mist too; and her
quiver, and herself, and Juno, with her lance, and all, vanish into
mist. Why not have said at once, if that is all you mean, that two
mists met, and one drove the other back? That would have been rational
and intelligible, but not to talk of celestial lances. Homer had no
such misty fancy; he believed the two goddesses were there in true
bodies, with true weapons, on the true earth; and still I ask, what
should Juno have done? Not beaten Diana? No; for it is unlady-like.
Un-English-lady-like, yes; but by no means un-Greek-lady-like, nor
even un-natural-lady-like. If a modern lady does _not_ beat her
servant or her rival about the ears, it is oftener because she is too
weak, or too proud, than because she is of purer mind than Homer's
Juno. She will not strike them; but she will overwork the one or
slander the other without pity; and Homer would not have thought that
one whit more goddess-like than striking them with her open hand.
If, however, the reader likes to suppose that while the two goddesses
in personal presence thus fought with arrow and quiver, there was also
a broader and vaster contest supposed by Homer between the elements
they ruled; and that the goddess of the heavens, as she struck the
goddess of the moon on the flushing cheek, was at the same instant
exercising omnipresent power in the heavens themselves, and gathering
clouds, with which, filled with the moon's own arrows or beams, she
was encumbering and concealing the moon; he is welcome to this out
carrying of the idea, provided that he does not pretend to make it an
interpretation instead of a mere extension, nor think to explain away
my real, running, beautiful beaten Diana, into a moon behind
clouds.[83]
It is only farther to be noted, that the Greek conception of Godhead,
as it was much more real than we usually suppose, so it was much more
bold and familiar than to a modern mind would be possible. I shall
have something more to observe, in a little while, of the danger of
our modern habit of endeavouring to raise ourselves to something like
comprehension of the truth of divinity, instead of simply believing
the words in which the Deity reveals Himself to us. The Greek erred
rather on the other side, making hardly any effort to conceive divine
mind as above the human; and no more shrinking from frank intercourse
with a divine being, or dreading its immediate presence, than that of
the simplest of mortals. Thus Atrides, enraged at his sword's breaking
in his hand upon the helmet of Paris, after he had expressly invoked
the assistance of Jupiter, exclaims aloud, as he would to a king who
had betrayed him, "Jove, Father, there is not another god more
evil-minded than thou!"[84] and Helen, provoked at Paris's defeat, and
oppressed with pouting shame both for him and for herself, when Venus
appears at her side, and would lead her back to the delivered Paris,
impatiently tells the goddess to "go and take care of Paris
herself."[85]
The modern mind is naturally, but vulgarly and unjustly, shocked by
this kind of familiarity. Rightly understood, it is not so much a sign
of misunderstanding of the divine nature as of good understanding of
the human. The Greek lived, in all things, a healthy, and, in a
certain degree, a perfect life. He had no morbid or sickly feeling of
any kind. He was accustomed to face death without the slightest
shrinking, to undergo all kinds of bodily hardship without complaint,
and to do what he supposed right and honourable, in most cases, as a
matter of course. Confident of his own immortality, and of the power
of abstract justice, he expected to be dealt with in the next world as
was right, and left the matter much in his god's hands; but being thus
immortal, and finding in his own soul something which it seemed quite
as difficult to master, as to rule the elements, he did not feel that
it was an appalling superiority in those gods to have bodies of water,
or fire, instead of flesh, and to have various work to do among the
clouds and waves, out of his human way; or sometimes, even in a sort
of service to himself. Was not the nourishment of herbs and flowers a
kind of ministering to his wants; were not the gods in some sort his
husbandmen, and spirit-servants? Their mere strength or omnipresence
did not seem to him a distinction absolutely terrific. It might be the
nature of one being to be in two places at once, and of another to be
only in one; but that did not seem of itself to infer any absolute
lordliness of one nature above the other, any more than an insect must
be a nobler creature than a man, because it can see on four sides of
its head, and the man only in front. They could kill him or torture
him, it was true; but even that not unjustly, or not for ever. There
was a fate, and a Divine Justice, greater than they; so that if they
did wrong, and he right, he might fight it out with them, and have the
better of them at last. In a general way, they were wiser, stronger,
and better than he; and to ask counsel of them, to obey them, to
sacrifice to them, to thank them for all good, this was well: but to
be utterly downcast before them, or not to tell them his mind in plain
Greek if they seemed to him to be conducting themselves in an ungodly
manner--this would not be well.
Such being their general idea of the gods, we can now easily
understand the habitual tone of their feelings towards what was
beautiful in nature. With us, observe, the idea of the Divinity is apt
to get separated from the life of nature; and imagining our God upon a
cloudy throne, far above the earth, and not in the flowers or waters,
we approach those visible things with a theory that they are dead;
governed by physical laws, and so forth. But coming to them, we find
the theory fail; that they are not dead; that, say what we choose
about them, the instinctive sense of their being alive is too strong
for us; and in scorn of all physical law, the wilful fountain sings,
and the kindly flowers rejoice. And then, puzzled, and yet happy;
pleased, and yet ashamed of being so; accepting sympathy from nature
which we do not believe it gives, and giving sympathy to nature, which
we do not believe it receives,--mixing, besides, all manner of
purposeful play and conceit with these involuntary fellowships,--we
fall necessarily into the curious web of hesitating sentiment,
pathetic fallacy, and wandering fancy, which form a great part of our
modern view of nature. But the Greek never removed his god out of
nature at all; never attempted for a moment to contradict his
instinctive sense that God was everywhere. "The tree _is_ glad," said
he, "I know it is; I can cut it down: no matter, there was a nymph in
it. The water _does_ sing," said he; "I can dry it up; but no matter,
there was a naiad in it." But in thus clearly defining his belief,
observe, he threw it entirely into a human form, and gave his faith to
nothing but the image of his own humanity. What sympathy and
fellowship he had, were always for the spirit _in_ the stream, not for
the stream; always for the dryad _in_ the wood, not for the wood.
Content with this human sympathy, he approached the actual waves and
woody fibres with no sympathy at all. The spirit that ruled them, he
received as a plain fact. Them, also, ruled and material, he received
as plain facts; they, without their spirit, were dead enough. A rose
was good for scent, and a stream for sound and coolness; for the rest,
one was no more than leaves, the other no more than water; he could
not make anything else of them; and the divine power, which was
involved in their existence, having been all distilled away by him
into an independent Flora or Thetis, the poor leaves or waves were
left, in mere cold corporealness, to make the most of their being
discernibly red and soft, clear and wet, and unacknowledged in any
other power whatsoever.
Then, observe farther, the Greeks lived in the midst of the most
beautiful nature, and were as familiar with blue sea, clear air, and
sweet outlines of mountain, as we are with brick walls, black smoke,
and level fields. This perfect familiarity rendered all such scenes of
natural beauty unexciting, if not indifferent to them, by lulling and
overwearying the imagination as far as it was concerned with such
things; but there was another kind of beauty which they found it
required effort to obtain, and which, when thoroughly obtained, seemed
more glorious than any of this wild loveliness--the beauty of the
human countenance and form. This, they perceived, could only be
reached by continual exercise of virtue; and it was in Heaven's sight,
and theirs, all the more beautiful because it needed this self-denial
to obtain it. So they set themselves to reach this, and having gained
it, gave it their principal thoughts, and set it off with beautiful
dress as best they might. But making this their object, they were
obliged to pass their lives in simple exercise and disciplined
employments. Living wholesomely, giving themselves no fever fits,
either by fasting or over-eating, constantly in the open air, and full
of animal spirit and physical power, they became incapable of every
morbid condition of mental emotion. Unhappy love, disappointed
ambition, spiritual despondency, or any other disturbing sensation,
had little power over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of the
blood; and what bitterness might yet fasten on them was soon boxed or
raced out of a boy, and spun or woven out of a girl, or danced out of
both. They had indeed their sorrows, true and deep, but still, more
like children's sorrows than ours, whether bursting into open cry of
pain, or hid with shuddering under the veil, still passing over the
soul as clouds do over heaven, not sullying it, not mingling with
it;--darkening it perhaps long or utterly, but still not becoming one
with it, and for the most part passing away in dashing rain of tears,
and leaving the man unchanged; in no wise affecting, as our sorrow
does, the whole tone of his thought and imagination thenceforward.
How far our melancholy may be deeper and wider than theirs in its
roots and view, and therefore nobler, we shall consider presently; but
at all events, they had the advantage of us in being entirely free
from all those dim and feverish sensations which result from unhealthy
state of the body. I believe that a large amount of the dreamy and
sentimental sadness, tendency to reverie, and general patheticalness
of modern life results merely from derangement of stomach; holding to
the Greek life the same relation that the feverish night of an adult
does to a child's sleep.
Farther. The human beauty, which, whether in its bodily being or in
imagined divinity, had become, for the reasons we have seen, the
principal object of culture and sympathy to these Greeks, was, in its
perfection, eminently orderly, symmetrical, and tender. Hence,
contemplating it constantly in this state, they could not but feel a
proportionate fear of all that was disorderly, unbalanced, and rugged.
Having trained their stoutest soldiers into a strength so delicate and
lovely, that their white flesh, with their blood upon it, should look
like ivory stained with purple;[86] and having always around them, in
the motion and majesty of this beauty, enough for the full employment
of their imagination, they shrank with dread or hatred from all the
ruggedness of lower nature,--from the wrinkled forest bark, the jagged
hill-crest, and irregular, inorganic storm of sky; looking to these
for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such
portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest and
health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its gentler
beauty.
Thus, as far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric
landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a
meadow, and a shady grove. This ideal is very interestingly marked, as
intended for a perfect one, in the fifth book of the _Odyssey_; when
Mercury himself stops for a moment, though on a message, to look at a
landscape "which even an immortal might be gladdened to behold."[87]
This landscape consists of a cave covered with a running vine, all
blooming into grapes, and surrounded by a grove of alder, poplar, and
sweet-smelling cypress. Four fountains of white (foaming) water,
springing _in succession_ (mark the orderliness), and close to one
another, flow away in different directions, through a meadow full of
violets and parsley (parsley, to mark its moisture, being elsewhere
called "marsh-nourished," and associated with the lotus[88]); the air
is perfumed not only by these violets, and by the sweet cypress, but
by Calypso's fire of finely chopped cedar-wood, which sends a smoke,
as of incense, through the island; Calypso herself is singing; and
finally, upon the trees are resting, or roosting, owls, hawks, and
"long-tongued sea-crows." Whether these last are considered as a part
of the ideal landscape, as marine singing birds, I know not; but the
approval of Mercury appears to be elicited chiefly by the fountains
and violet meadow.
Now the notable things in this description are, first, the evident
subservience of the whole landscape to human comfort, to the foot, the
taste, or the smell; and, secondly, that throughout the passage there
is not a single figurative word expressive of the things being in any
wise other than plain grass, fruit, or flower. I have used the term
"spring" of the fountains, because, without doubt, Homer means that
they sprang forth brightly, having their source at the foot of the
rocks (as copious fountains nearly always have); but Homer does not
say "spring," he says simply flow, and uses only one word for "growing
softly," or "richly," of the tall trees, the vine, and the violets.
There is, however, some expression of sympathy with the sea-birds; he
speaks of them in precisely the same terms, as in other places of
naval nations, saying they "have care of the works of the sea."
If we glance through the references to pleasant landscape which occur
in other parts of the _Odyssey_, we shall always be struck by this
quiet subjection of their every feature to human service, and by the
excessive similarity in the scenes. Perhaps the spot intended, after
this, to be most perfect, may be the garden of Alcinous, where the
principal ideas are, still more definitely, order, symmetry and
fruitfulness;[89] the beds being duly ranged between rows of vines,
which, as well as the pear, apple, and fig trees, bear fruit
continually, some grapes being yet sour, while others are getting
black; there are plenty of "_orderly_ square beds of herbs," chiefly
leeks, and two fountains, one running through the garden, and one
under the pavement of the palace to a reservoir for the citizens.
Ulysses, pausing to contemplate this scene, is described nearly in the
same terms as Mercury pausing to contemplate the wilder meadow; and it
is interesting to observe, that, in spite of all Homer's love of
symmetry, the god's admiration is excited by the free fountains, wild
violets, and wandering vine; but the mortal's, by the vines in rows,
the leeks in beds, and the fountains in pipes.
Ulysses has, however, one touching reason for loving vines in rows.
His father had given him fifty rows for himself, when he was a boy,
with corn between them (just as it now grows in Italy). Proving his
identity afterwards to his father, whom he finds at work in his
garden, "with thick gloves on, to keep his hands from the thorns," he
reminds him of these fifty rows of vines, and of the "thirteen
pear-trees and ten apple-trees" which he had given him: and Laertes
faints upon his neck.[90]
If Ulysses had not been so much of a gardener, it might have been
received as a sign of considerable feeling for landscape beauty, that,
intending to pay the very highest possible compliment to the Princess
Nausicaa (and having, indeed, the moment before gravely asked her
whether she was a goddess or not), he says that he feels, at seeing
her, exactly as he did when he saw the young palm tree growing at
Apollo's shrine at Delos.[91] But I think the taste for trim hedges
and upright trunks has its usual influence over him here also, and
that he merely means to tell the princess that she is delightfully
tall and straight.
The princess is, however, pleased by his address, and tells him to
wait outside the town, till she can speak to her father about him. The
spot to which she directs him is another ideal piece of landscape,
composed of a "beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain, and a
meadow,"[92] near the road-side: in fact, as nearly as possible such a
scene as meets the eye of the traveller every instant on the
much-despised lines of road through lowland France; for instance, on
the railway between Arras and Amiens;--scenes, to my mind, quite
exquisite in the various grouping and grace of their innumerable
poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over their level
meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the princess means
aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants
at the palace, all spinning and in perpetual motion, compared to the
"leaves of the tall poplar"; and it is with exquisite feeling that it
is made afterwards[93] the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine; its
light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression
of fragility, faintness, and inconstancy which the ancients attributed
to the disembodied spirit.[94] The likeness to the poplars by the
streams of Amiens is more marked still in the _Iliad_, where the young
Simois, struck by Ajax, falls to the earth "like an aspen that has
grown in an irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots
springing from its top, which some coach-making man has cut down with
his keen iron, that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it
lies parching by the side of the stream."[95] It is sufficiently
notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells
thus delightedly on all the _flat_ bits; and so I think invariably the
inhabitants of mountain countries do, but the inhabitants of the
plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains. The
Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and
pollards;[96] Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes
his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and willows, a
distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about it, a windmill, and a
ditch. The Flemish sacred painters are the only ones who introduce
mountains in the distance, as we shall see presently; but rather in a
formal way than with any appearance of enjoyment. So Shakspere never
speaks of mountains with the slightest joy, but only of lowland
flowers, flat fields, and Warwickshire streams. And if we talk to the
mountaineer, he will usually characterize his own country to us as a
"pays affreux," or in some equivalent, perhaps even more violent,
German term: but the lowland peasant does not think his country
frightful; he either will have no ideas beyond it, or about it; or
will think it a very perfect country, and be apt to regard any
deviation from its general principle of flatness with extreme
disfavour; as the Lincolnshire farmer in _Alton Locke_: "I'll shaw 'ee
some'at like a field o' beans, I wool--none o' this here darned ups
and downs o' hills, to shake a body's victuals out of his inwards--all
so vlat as a barn's vloor, for vorty mile on end--there's the country
to live in!"[97]
I do not say whether this be altogether right (though certainly not
wholly wrong), but it seems to me that there must be in the simple
freshness and fruitfulness of level land, in its pale upright trees,
and gentle lapse of silent streams, enough for the satisfaction of the
human mind in general; and I so far agree with Homer, that, if I had
to educate an artist to the full perception of the meaning of the word
"gracefulness" in landscape, I should send him neither to Italy nor to
Greece, but simply to those poplar groves between Arras and Amiens.
But to return more definitely to our Homeric landscape. When it is
perfect, we have, as in the above instances, the foliage and meadows
together; when imperfect, it is always either the foliage or the
meadow; pre-eminently the meadow, or arable field. Thus, meadows of
asphodel are prepared for the happier dead; and even Orion, a hunter
among the mountains in his lifetime, pursues the ghosts of beasts in
these asphodel meadows after death.[98] So the sirens sing in a
meadow; [99] and throughout the _Odyssey_ there is a general tendency
to the depreciation of poor Ithaca, because it is rocky, and only fit
for goats, and has "no meadows";[100] for which reason Telemachus
refuses Atrides's present of horses, congratulating the Spartan king
at the same time on ruling over a plain which has "plenty of lotus in
it, and rushes," with corn and barley. Note this constant dwelling on
the marsh plants, or, at least, those which grow in flat and
well-irrigated land, or beside streams: when Scamander, for instance,
is restrained by Vulcan, Homer says, very sorrowfully, that "all his
lotus, and reeds, and rushes were burnt";[101] and thus Ulysses, after
being shipwrecked and nearly drowned, and beaten about the sea for
many days and nights, on raft and mast, at last getting ashore at the
mouth of a large river, casts himself down first upon its _rushes_,
and then, in thankfulness, kisses the "corn-giving land," as most
opposed, in his heart, to the fruitless and devouring sea.[102]
In this same passage, also, we find some peculiar expressions of the
delight which the Greeks had in trees; for, when Ulysses first comes
in sight of land, which gladdens him "as the reviving of a father from
his sickness gladdens his children," it is not merely the sight of the
land itself which gives him such pleasure, but of the "land and
_wood_." Homer never throws away any words, at least in such a place
as this; and what in another poet would have been merely the filling
up of the deficient line with an otherwise useless word, is in him the
expression of the general Greek sense, that land of any kind was in no
wise grateful or acceptable till there was _wood_ upon it (or corn;
but the corn, in the flats, could not be seen so far as the black
masses of forest on the hill sides), and that, as in being rushy and
corn-giving, the low land, so in being woody, the high land was most
grateful to the mind of the man who for days and nights had been
wearied on the engulphing sea. And this general idea of wood and corn,
as the types of the fatness of the whole earth, is beautifully marked
in another place of the _Odyssey_,[103] where the sailors in a desert
island, having no flour of corn to offer as a meat offering with their
sacrifices, take the leaves of the trees, and scatter them over the
burnt offering instead.
But still, every expression of the pleasure which Ulysses has in this
landing and resting, contains uninterruptedly the reference to the
utility and sensible pleasantness of all things, not to their beauty.
After his first grateful kiss given to the corn-growing land, he
considers immediately how he is to pass the night; for some minutes
hesitating whether it will be best to expose himself to the misty
chill from the river, or run the risk of wild beasts in the wood. He
decides for the wood, and finds in it a bower formed by a sweet and a
wild olive tree, interlacing their branches, or--perhaps more
accurately translating Homer's intensely graphic expression--"changing
their branches with each other" (it is very curious how often, in an
entanglement of wood, one supposes the branches to belong to the wrong
trees) and forming a roof penetrated by neither rain, sun, nor wind.
Under this bower Ulysses collects the "_vain_ (or _frustrate_)
outpouring of the dead leaves"--another exquisite expression, used
elsewhere of useless grief or shedding of tears;--and, having got
enough together, makes his bed of them, and goes to sleep, having
covered himself up with them, "as embers are covered up with
ashes."[104]
Nothing can possibly be more intensely possessive of the _facts_ than
this whole passage: the sense of utter deadness and emptiness, and
frustrate fall in the leaves; of dormant life in the human body,--the
fire, and heroism, and strength of it, lulled under the dead brown
heap, as embers under ashes, and the knitting of interchanged and
close strength of living boughs above. But there is not the smallest
apparent sense of there being _beauty_ elsewhere than in the human
being. The wreathed wood is admired simply as being a perfect roof for
it; the fallen leaves only as being a perfect bed for it; and there is
literally no more excitement of emotion in Homer, as he describes
them, nor does he expect us to be more excited or touched by hearing
about them, than if he had been telling us how the chambermaid at the
Bull aired the four-poster, and put on two extra blankets.
Now, exactly this same contemplation of subservience to human use
makes the Greek take some pleasure in _rocks_, when they assume one
particular form, but one only--that of a _cave_. They are evidently
quite frightful things to him under any other condition, and most of
all if they are rough and jagged; but if smooth, looking "sculptured,"
like the sides of a ship, and forming a cave or shelter for him, he
begins to think them endurable. Hence, associating the ideas of rich
and sheltering wood, sea, becalmed and made useful as a port by
protecting promontories of rock, and smoothed caves or grottoes in the
rocks themselves, we get the pleasantest idea which the Greek could
form of a landscape, next to a marsh with poplars in it; not, indeed,
if possible, ever to be without these last; thus, in commending the
Cyclops' country as one possessed of every perfection, Homer erst
says: "They have soft _marshy_ meadows near the sea, and good, rich,
crumbling, ploughing-land, giving fine deep crops, and vines always
giving fruit"; then, "a port so quiet, that they have no need of
cables in it; and at the head of the port, a beautiful clear spring
just _under a cave_, and _aspen poplars all round it_."[105]
This, it will be seen, is very nearly Homer's usual "ideal"; but,
going into the middle of the island, Ulysses comes on a rougher and
less agreeable bit, though still fulfilling certain required
conditions of endurableness; a "cave shaded with laurels,"[106] which,
having no poplars about it, is, however, meant to be somewhat
frightful, and only fit to be inhabited by a Cyclops. So in the
country of the Læstrygons, Homer, preparing his reader gradually for
something very disagreeable, represents the rocks as bare and "exposed
to the sun";[107] only with some smooth and slippery roads over them,
by which the trucks bring down wood from the higher hills. Any one
familiar with Swiss slopes of hills must remember how often he has
descended, sometimes faster than was altogether intentional, by these
same slippery woodman's truck roads.
And thus, in general, whenever the landscape is intended to be lovely,
it verges towards the ploughed lands and poplars; or, at worst, to
_woody_ rocks; but, if intended to be painful, the rocks are bare and
"sharp." This last epithet, constantly used by Homer for mountains,
does not altogether correspond, in Greek, to the English term, nor is
it intended merely to characterize the sharp mountain summits; for it
never would be applied simply to the edge or point of a sword, but
signifies rather "harsh," "bitter," or "painful," being applied
habitually to fate, death, and in _Odyssey_ xi. 333, to a halter; and,
as expressive of general objectionableness and unpleasantness, to all
high, dangerous, or peaked mountains, as the Maleian promontory (a
much-dreaded one), the crest of Parnassus, the Tereian mountain, and a
grim or untoward, though, by keeping off the force of the sea,
protective, rock at the mouth of the Jardanus; as well as habitually
to inaccessible or impregnable fortresses built on heights.
In all this I cannot too strongly mark the utter absence of any
trace of the feeling for what we call the picturesque, and the
constant dwelling of the writer's mind on what was available,
pleasant, or useful: his ideas respecting all landscape being not
uncharacteristially summed, finally, by Pallas herself; when, meeting
Ulysses, who after his long wandering does not recognize his own
country, and meaning to describe it as politely and soothingly as
possible, she says:[108]--"This Ithaca of ours is, indeed, a rough
country enough, and not good for driving in; but, still, things might
be worse: it has plenty of corn, and good wine, and _always rain_,
and soft nourishing dew; and it has good feeding for goats and oxen,
and all manner of wood, and springs fit to drink at all the year
round."
We shall see presently how the blundering, pseudo-picturesque,
pseudo-classical minds of Claude and the Renaissance landscape-painters,
wholly missing Homer's practical common sense, and equally incapable
of feeling the quiet natural grace and sweetness of his asphodel
meadows, tender aspen poplars, or running vines,--fastened on his
_ports_ and _caves_, as the only available features of his scenery;
and appointed the type of "classical landscape" thenceforward to
consist in a bay of insipid sea, and a rock with a hole through
it.[109]
It may indeed be thought that I am assuming too hastily that this was
the general view of the Greeks respecting landscape, because it was
Homer's. But I believe the true mind of a nation, at any period, is
always best ascertainable by examining that of its greatest men; and
that simpler and truer results will be attainable for us by simply
comparing Homer, Dante, and Walter Scott, than by attempting (what my
limits must have rendered absurdly inadequate, and in which, also,
both my time and knowledge must have failed me) an analysis of the
landscape in the range of contemporary literature. All that I can do,
is to state the general impression, which has been made upon me by my
desultory reading, and to mark accurately the grounds for this
impression in the works of the greatest men. Now it is quite true that
in others of the Greeks, especially in Æschylus and Aristophanes,
there is infinitely more of modern feeling, of pathetic fallacy, love
of picturesque or beautiful form, and other such elements, than there
is in Homer; but then these appear to me just the parts of them which
were not Greek, the elements of their minds by which (as one division
of the human race always must be with subsequent ones) they are
connected with the mediævals and moderns. And without doubt, in his
influence over future mankind, Homer is eminently the Greek of Greeks:
if I were to associate any one with him it would be Herodotus, and I
believe all I have said of the Homeric landscape will be found equally
true of the Herodotean, as assuredly it will be of the Platonic;--the
contempt, which Plato sometimes expresses by the mouth of Socrates,
for the country in general, except so far as it is shady, and has
cicadas and running streams to make pleasant noises in it, being
almost ludicrous. But Homer is the great type, and the more notable
one because of his influence on Virgil, and, through him, on Dante,
and all the after ages: and, in like manner, if we can get the
abstract of mediæval landscape out of Dante, it will serve us as well
as if we had read all the songs of the troubadours, and help us to the
farther changes in derivative temper, down to all modern time.
I think, therefore, the reader may safely accept the conclusions about
Greek landscape which I have got for him out of Homer; and in these he
will certainly perceive something very different from the usual
imaginations we form of Greek feelings. We think of the Greeks as
poetical, ideal, imaginative, in the way that a modern poet or
novelist is; supposing that their thoughts about their mythology and
world were as visionary and artificial as ours are: but I think the
passages I have quoted show that it was not so, although it may be
difficult for us to apprehend the strange minglings in them of the
elements of faith, which, in our days, have been blended with other
parts of human nature in a totally different guise. Perhaps the Greek
mind may be best imagined by taking, as its groundwork, that of a
good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer
of a century or two back, having perfect faith in the bodily
appearances of Satan and his imps; and in all kelpies, brownies, and
fairies. Substitute for the indignant terrors in this man's mind, a
general persuasion of the _Divinity_, more or less beneficent, yet
faultful, of all these beings; that is to say, take away his belief in
the demoniacal malignity of the fallen spiritual world, and lower, in
the same degree, his conceptions of the angelical, retaining for him
the same firm faith in both; keep his ideas about flowers and
beautiful scenery much as they are,--his delight in regular ploughed
land and meadows, and a neat garden (only with rows of gooseberry
bushes instead of vines), being, in all probability, about accurately
representative of the feelings of Ulysses; then, let the military
spirit that is in him, glowing against the Border forager, or the foe
of old Flodden and Chevy-Chase,[110] be made more principal, with a
higher sense of nobleness in soldiership, not as a careless
excitement, but a knightly duty; and increased by high cultivation of
every personal quality, not of mere shaggy strength, but graceful
strength, aided by a softer climate, and educated in all proper
harmony of sight and sound: finally, instead of an informed Christian,
suppose him to have only the patriarchal Jewish knowledge of the
Deity, and even this obscured by tradition, but still thoroughly
solemn and faithful, requiring his continual service as a priest of
burnt sacrifice and meat offering; and I think we shall get a pretty
close approximation to the vital being of a true old Greek; some
slight difference still existing in a feeling which the Scotch farmer
would have of a pleasantness in blue hills and running streams, wholly
wanting in the Greek mind; and perhaps also some difference of views
on the subjects of truth and honesty. But the main points, the easy,
athletic, strongly logical and argumentative, yet fanciful and
credulous, characters of mind, would be very similar in both; and the
most serious change in the substance of the stuff among the
modifications above suggested as necessary to turn the Scot into the
Greek, is that effect of softer climate and surrounding luxury,
inducing the practice of various forms of polished art,--the more
polished, because the practical and realistic tendency of the Hellenic
mind (if my interpretation of it be right) would quite prevent it from
taking pleasure in any irregularities of form, or imitations of the
weeds and wildnesses of that mountain nature with which it thought
itself born to contend. In its utmost refinement of work, it sought
eminently for orderliness; carried the principle of the leeks in
squares, and fountains in pipes, perfectly out in its streets and
temples; formalized whatever decoration it put into its minor
architectural mouldings, and reserved its whole heart and power to
represent the action of living men, or gods, though not unconscious,
meanwhile, of
The simple, the sincere delight;
The habitual scene of hill and dale;
The rural herds, the vernal gale;
The tangled vetches' purple bloom;
The fragrance of the bean's perfume,--
Theirs, theirs alone, who cultivate the soil,
And drink the cup of thirst, and eat the bread of toil.[111]
[74] _Endymion_, 2. 349-350.
[75] See p. 68.
[76] _Iliad_, 21. 212-360.
[77] Compare _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, canto i. stanza 15, and
canto v. stanza 2. In the first instance, the river-spirit is
accurately the Homeric god, only Homer would have believed in
it,--Scott did not, at least not altogether. [Ruskin.]
[78] _The Excursion_, 4. 861-871.
[79] _Genesis_ xxviii, 12; xxxii, 1; xxii, 11; _Joshua_ v, 13 ff.;
_Judges_ xiii, 3 ff.
[80] _Iliad_, 5. 846.
[81] _Iliad_, 1. 43.
[82] _Iliad_, 21. 489 ff.
[83] Compare the exquisite lines of Longfellow on the sunset in
_The Golden Legend_:--
The day is done; and slowly from the scene
The stooping sun up-gathers his spent shafts.
And puts them back into his golden quiver. [Ruskin.]
[84] _Iliad_, 3. 365.
[85] _Iliad_, 3. 406 ff.
[86] _Iliad_, 4. 141. [Ruskin.]
[87] _Odyssey_, 5. 63-74.
[88] _Iliad_, 2. 776. [Ruskin.]
[89] _Odyssey_ 7. 112-132.
[90] _Odyssey_, 24. 334 ff.
[91] _Odyssey_, 6. 162.
[92] _Odyssey_, 6. 291-292.
[93] _Odyssey_, 10. 510. [Ruskin.]
[94] Compare the passage in Dante referred to above, p. 60.
[Ruskin.]
[95] _Iliad_, 4. 482-487.
[96] Pollards, trees polled or cut back at some height above the
ground, producing a thick growth of young branches in a rounded
mass.
[97] Quoted, with some omission, from chapter 12.
[98] _Odyssey_, 11. 572; 24. 13. The couch of Ceres, with Homer's
usual faithfulness, is made of a _ploughed_ field, 5. 127.
[Ruskin.]
[99] _Odyssey_, 12. 45.
[100] _Odyssey_, 4. 605.
[101] _Iliad_, 21. 351.
[102] _Odyssey_, 5. 398, 463. [Ruskin.]
[103] _Odyssey_, 12. 357. [Ruskin.]
[104] _Odyssey_, 5. 481-493.
[105] _Odyssey_, 9. 132, etc. Hence Milton's