[772] Il. v. 196.
κρῖ λευκὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι καὶ ὀλύρας.
To each he gives the appropriate provender: to the former, in an
encampment, what the grassy marsh by its side afforded: to the latter,
in a king’s palace, the grain, or hard food, of their proper home.
And so in the night-adventure of the Tenth Book, when Ulysses drags
away the bodies of those Thracians whom Diomed has slain, it is to make
a clear path for the horses of Rhesus which were to be carried off,
that they may not take fright from treading on corpses[773];
[773] Il. x. 489-93.
νεκροῖς ἀμβαίνοντες· ἀήθεσσον γὰρ ἔτ’ αὐτῶν.
Throughout the chariot-race, in the Twenty-third Book, we find them
uppermost in the Poet’s mind, though the drivers, being his prime
heroes, are not wholly forgotten.
Even as to colour, of which Homer’s perceptions appear to have been
so vague, it may be remarked, that he employs it somewhat more freely
with reference to horses, than to other objects having definite form or
powers of locomotion.
But his liveliest conceptions of them are with respect to motion,
form, and feelings: and I suppose there is no poem like the Iliad for
characteristic touches in respect to any of the three.
~_Beauty in inanimate nature._~
It has been much debated whether the ancients generally, and whether
Homer in particular, had any distinct idea of beauty in landscape.
It may be admitted, even in respect to Homer, that his similes, to
which one would naturally look for proof, less commonly refer to the
eye than to other faculties. They commonly turn upon sound, motion,
force, or multitude: rarely, in comparison, upon colour, or even upon
form; still more rarely upon colour or form in such combinations as to
constitute what we call the picturesque.
It seems to me, that we may draw the best materials of a demonstration
in this case from comparing his descriptions of the form of scenery
by means of the outlines of countries, with his use of other epithets
which he employs to denote beauty.
The country of Lacedæmon was mountainous, and it is hence termed by
Homer in the Odyssey and in the Catalogue, κοιλή. (Il. ii. 581, Od. iv.
1.)
But it is also termed by him ἐρατεινὴ (Il. iii. 239), and this, it may
be observed, in a speech of Helen’s; to whom, while she was at Troy,
the image of it in memory could hardly, perhaps, be agreeable from any
moral association. We are, therefore, led to refer it to the physical
conformation or beauty of the district.
Next, we have pretty clear proof that in Homer’s mind the epithet
ἐρατεινὴ was one proper to describe beauty in the strictest sense. For
he says of Helen, with regard to her daughter Hermione[774]:
[774] Od. iv. 13.
ἐγείνατο παῖδ’ ἐρατεινὴν,
Ἑρμιόνην, ἣ εἶδος ἔχε χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης.
‘She had a lovely (ἐρατεινὴν) daughter, endowed with the beauty of
golden Aphrodite.’ And I observe but few passages in Homer, perhaps
only one (Od. xxiii. 300), when ἐρατεινὸς does not naturally and
properly bear this sense. A sense etymologically analogous to our own
use of the word _lovely_, which we employ to indicate not only beauty,
but a high degree of it.
It therefore appears to be clear that Homer called Lacedæmon ἐρατεινὴ,
because it was shaped in mountain and valley, and because countries
so formed present a beautiful appearance to the eye, as compared with
countries of other forms less marked. It is applied to Emathia (Il.
xiv. 225) and to Scheria (Od. vii. 79), both mountainous; to the city
Ilios, (Il. v. 210), which stood on ground high and partially abrupt
near the roots of Ida; and I do not find it in any place of the poems
associated with flat lands.
The other instance which I shall cite seems to present the argument in
a complete form, within the compass of a single line.
When describing Ithaca in the Odyssey, Telemachus says it is[775],
[775] Od. iv. 606.
αἰγίβοτος, καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος ἱπποβότοιο.
Here we may assume that by αἰγίβοτος, goat-feeding, he means
mountainous, and even sharp and rocky; moreover consequently, in
comparison, barren, so that it could not be agreeable in the sense of
being profitable. On the other hand, the horse is an animal ill-suited
to range among rocks; and by ἱππόβοτος Homer always means a district or
country sufficiently open and plain to be suitable for feeding horses
in numbers. Now, in saying that Arran is more ἐπήρατος than southern
Lancashire, we should leave no doubt upon the mind of any reader as
to the meaning; which must surely be that it offers more beauty to the
eye. Just such a comparison does Homer make of the scenery of Ithaca as
it was with what it would have been, if the island had been flat.
I ought however to notice the very forced interpretation of Damm, which
is this: _μᾶλλον ἐπήρατος, sc. ἐμοὶ, nam est patria mea; et ad μᾶλλον
subintelligit τοῦ σοῦ Ἄργεος φίλη μοι ἔστι_.
Homer was better versed in the art of wedding words to thought, than
such an interpretation supposes. For, according to it, the thought
of Homer was this; ‘Though you rule over broad and open Argos, my
mountainous Ithaca is dearer to me, _because it is my country_.’ So
that he has left out the point of the sentence, without the faintest
trace to guide his reader. The idea of the sentence, which is prolonged
through many verses, turns entirely on the difference between an
open and a steep rocky country as such, and not in the least on
native attachments. And Telemachus, who is lauding the richness and
fertility of Argos, and apologizing for the barrenness of Ithaca,
not ungracefully, in passing, throws in, by way of compensation, the
element of beauty, as one possessed by Ithaca, and as one which it must
miss if it were flat.
Indeed, we here trace the usual refinement of Homer in this, that
Telemachus does not say, True, your Argos is rich, but my Ithaca is
picturesque: but, after commending the fertility of broad Argos, he
says, ‘In Ithaca we have no broad runs[776], and nothing like a meadow:
it will feed nothing but goats, yet it is more picturesque than if
_it_, a little speck of that kind, were flat and open.’
[776] He uses the phrase δρόμοι εὐρέες. It is curious to find the word
_runs_, so recently re-established as the classical word for the large
open spaces of pasturage in the regions of Australasia.
The word ἐπήρατος is less frequently used in Homer than ἐρατεινός;
but we have it in six places besides this. There is only one of them
where it is capable of meaning dear, in connection with the idea of
country[777]. In another it means enjoyable or splendid, being applied
to the banquet[778]. In the other places it is applied to a town on the
Shield, a cavern in Ithaca (twice), and the garments put upon Venus in
Cyprus; and in those four places it can only mean fair or beautiful.
[777] Il. xxii. 121.
[778] Il. ix. 228.
We are not, then, justified in limiting Homer’s sense of natural beauty
to what was associated with utility[779]. On the contrary, it appears
plainly to extend to beauty proper, and even to that kind of beauty in
nature which we of the present day most love.
[779] See Mr. Cope’s Essay on the Picturesque among the Greeks;
Cambridge Essays, 1856. p. 126.
I have dealt thus far with the most doubtful part of the question, and
have ventured to dissent from Mr. Ruskin, whose authority I admit, and
of whose superior insight, as well as of his extraordinary powers of
expression, I am fully conscious.
~_Germ of feeling for the picturesque._~
Mr. Ruskin thinks[780] that ‘Homer has no trace of feeling for what we
call the picturesque’; that Telemachus apologizes for the scenery of
Ithaca; and that rocks are never loved but as caves. I think that the
expressions I have produced from the text show that these propositions
cannot be sustained. At the same time I admit that the feeling with
Homer is one in the bud only: as, indeed, until within a very few
generations, it has lain undeveloped among ourselves. Homer may have
been the father of this sentiment for his nation, as he was of so much
besides. But the plant did not grow up kindly among those who followed
him.
[780] Ruskin’s Modern Painters, part iv. chap. xiii. pp. 189-92.
I assent entirely, on the other hand, to what Mr. Ruskin has said
respecting his sense of orderly beauty in common nature. The garden
of Alcinous is truly Dutch in its quadrangular conceptions; but it is
plain that the Poet means us to regard it as truly beautiful[781].
Symmetry, serenity, regularity, adopted from the forms of living beauty
which were before him, enter largely into Homer’s conceptions of one
form, at least, of inanimate beauty.
[781] Od. vii. 112-32.
The scenery of the cave of Calypso[782] is less restrained in its cast,
than is the garden in Scheria; but even here Homer introduces four
fountains, which compose a regular figure, and are evidently meant
to supply an element of form which was required by the fashionable
standard.
[782] Od. v. 63-75.
Another element of landscape, as we understand it, is, that the natural
objects which it represents should be in rather extensive combination;
and our established traditions would also require that the view of them
should be modified by the rendering of the atmosphere, especially with
reference to the scale of distances.
It is very difficult to find instances of extended landscape in Homer.
But I think that we have at least one, in the famed simile, where he
compares the Trojan watchfires on the plain to the calm night, which
by the light of moon and stars exhibits a breadth of prospect to the
rejoicing shepherd’s eye. Here are certainly tranquillity and order;
but with them we seem also to have both extent and atmosphere; to which
even bold and even broken outline must be added by those who, like
myself, are not prepared to surrender to the destroying ὄβελος the
line[783]
[783] Il. viii. 557.
ἔκ τ’ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ, καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι.
Upon the whole, considering Homer’s early date, and the very late
development among the moderns of a taste for scenery of the picturesque
and romantic order, I do not know that we are entitled even at first
sight to challenge him as inferior to any modern of analogous date
in this province. Yet we may fairly pronounce that he is inferior to
himself; that is to say, he appears to have a sense of beauty, in the
region of inanimate nature, certainly less keen in proportion than
that, with which he looked upon the animated creation.
What is deficient in him with respect to landscape may however, in all
likelihood, be more justly referred to positive than to negative causes.
~_Causes adverse to a more developed feeling._~
It may be questioned whether the disposition to appreciate still
nature, especially in large and elaborated combinations, may not in
part depend upon conditions that were not to be found in the age of
Homer. I should say, if the expression may be allowed, that we of this
generation take landscape medicinally. Human life grows with the course
of ages; and, especially in our age, it has grown to be excited and
hurried. But nature has a reacting tendency towards repose; and, even
in the case of the grosser stimulants, it seems to be their soothing
power which most helps to recommend them. Besides the fact, however,
that we have wants which the Greeks had not, this subject may be
regarded in a broader view.
The mind of Homer and the mind of his age were not addicted even to
contemplation, far less to introspection. Of ideas properly subjective
there are very few indeed to be found in the poems. We have one such
furnished by the passage where he equates thought to a wing, in a
simile for the swift ships of the Phæacians,
ὡσεὶ πτέρον ἠὲ νόημα.
And another, the most remarkable that he supplies, when in more detail
he uses the motion of a thought for an illustration of the rapid flight
of Juno[784].
[784] Il. xv. 80.
Even when it became speculative, the Greek mind did not give a
subjective turn to its speculations. It was probably Christianity
which, by the stimulus it applied to the general conscience, first gave
mankind the introspective habit on a large scale; and mixed causes
may often render the tendency excessive and morbid. But the tendency
of the heroic age, standing at its maximum in Homer, was to pour life
outward, nay almost to force it into every thing. The fountain from
within overflowed; and its surplus went to make inanimate nature
breathe. The profuse and easy fertility of Homer in simile surely of
itself demonstrates a wonderful observation and appreciation of nature;
but, as has been remarked, these similes are very rarely indeed _still_
similes. They delight in sound, in multitude, above all in motion.
The automatic chairs of Vulcan, the living theatre of the Shield of
Achilles, that oldest mirror of our world, the bounding armour of the
same hero, what are all these but the proofs of that redundant energy
of life, whose first resistless impulse it was to carry the vital fire
of Prometheus into every object that it encountered, and which, not yet
having felt the palsying touch of exhaustion, lay under no necessity of
curative provisions for repose? Therefore, while admitting the defect
of Homer with respect to colour, and admitting also that landscape (if
we are to understand by it the elaborate combination of natural objects
reaching over considerable distances) is a great addition to the
enjoyment and wealth of mankind, I think the capital explanation of the
question raised is to be found, not in the want of any space, or of any
faculty, in the mind of Homer, but in the fact that the space and the
faculties were all occupied with more active and vivifying functions;
that the beautiful forms in nature, which we see as beautiful forms
only, were to him the hem of the garments, as it were, of that life
with which all nature teemed. Accordingly, the general rule of the
poems is, that where we should be passive, he is active; that which we
think it much to contemplate with satisfaction, he is ever at work,
with a bolder energy and a keener pleasure, to vivify. We deal with
external nature, as it were unrifled; he saw in it only the residue
which remained to it, after it had at every point thrown off its cream
in supernatural formations. His uplifting and vitalizing process is
everywhere at work. Animate nature is raised even to divinity; and
inanimate nature is borne upward into life.
If, then, Homer sees less in the mere sensible forms of natural objects
than we do, it probably is in a great degree because the genius of his
people and his own genius had taught him to invest them with a soul,
which drew up into itself the best of their attractions. Mr. Ruskin
most justly tells us, with reference to the sea, that he cuts off
from the material object the sense of something living, and fashions
it into a great abstract image of a sea-power[785]. Yet it is not, I
think, quite true, that the Poet leaves in the watery mass no element
of life. On the contrary, I should say the key to his whole treatment
of external nature is to be found in this one proposition: wheresoever
we look for figure, he looks for life. His waves (as well as his fire)
when they are stirred[786], shout, in the very word (ἰάχειν) that
he gives to the Assembly of Achæans: when they break in foam, they
put on the plume of the warrior’s helmet[787] (κορύσσεσθαι): when
their lord drives over them, they open wide for joy[788]: and when he
strides upon the field of battle, they, too, boil upon the shore, in an
irrepressible sympathy with his effort and emotion[789].
[785] Modern Painters, part iv. ch. xiii. p. 174.
[786] Il. xxiii. 216. i. 482.
[787] Il. iv. 424.
[788] Γηθοσύνῃ δὲ θάλασσα διΐστατο, Il. xiii. 29.
[789] Il. xiv. 392.