of _Michael_. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the
ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might
perhaps have hoped, to the grand style.
O lang, lang may their ladies sit,
Wi’ their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence
Come sailing to the land.
O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi’ their gold combs in their hair,
Waiting for their ain dear lords,
For they’ll see them nae mair.
But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter
fills it over and over again, is, indeed, in itself, all in all, one
must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus
overpowering, in the great body of a narrative.
But, after all, Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because
he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument; he took this
instrument because he was a _different_ poet from them; so different,
not only so much better, but so essentially different, that he has not
to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their distinctive
character, not from their subject, but from their application to that
subject of the ideas (to quote the _Excursion_)
On God, on Nature, and on human life,
which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad-poets in general,
as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity
is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is
scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From
them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and
significance which underlies the narrative. Even in later times of
richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be
called a _balladist’s mind_; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for
the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense
of the inward significance of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to
their narrative of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak,
travelling out of their own province: in the best of them you feel this
perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly.
Even Sir Walter Scott’s efforts of this kind, even, for instance, the
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
or the
O woman! in our hours of ease,
even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired; far more
than the same poet’s descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord
Macaulay’s
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate:
‘To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late’.
(and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord
Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, let me frankly say that, to my mind,
a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good
measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at
all), I say, Lord Macaulay’s
To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late,
it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very
different. This ‘noble barbarian’, this ‘savage with the lively eye’,
whose verse, Mr Newman thinks, would affect us, if we could hear the
living Homer, ‘like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the
Gold Coast’, is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in
applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs,
narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date, to an incomparably
more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or
than Scott and Macaulay; he is here as much to be distinguished from
them, and in the same way, as Milton is to be distinguished from them.
He is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the balladists
and Scott; for what he has in common with Milton, the noble and profound
application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic
greatness. The most essentially grand and characteristic things of Homer
are such things as
ἔτλην δ’, οἷ’ οὔπω τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἂλλος,
ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι[67],
or as
καὶ σὲ, γέρον, τὸ πρὶν μὲν ἀκούομεν ὄλβιον εἶναι[68],
or as
ὥς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν,
ζώειν ἀχνυμένους· αὐτοὶ δὲ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν[69],
and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the
balladists, by such things as the
Io no piangeva: sì dentro impietrai:
Piangevan elli ...[70]
of Dante; or the