NATURE IN HEBREW POETRY, AND IN HOMER.
The method pursued in this book has been, beginning with some general
views, from these to descend to special illustrations, in order to
exemplify what has been said of Poetry in a general way, by pointing to
the several methods which the poets have actually followed in delineating
Nature and her aspects.
It will be but to carry out somewhat more in detail the same procedure
if I now adduce a few samples of the way in which some of the greatest
poets of each age and country have in their works shown their feeling
towards Nature. To exhaust this subject would require a large treatise.
A chapter or two is all that can here be afforded to it. In glancing
thus, which is all we can do, at a few of the great mountain-summits of
song, many a lesser elevation in the long line of poetry, that might well
repay attention, must needs be passed in silence. I shall begin with the
earliest poets we know, and come down to those near our own time. In
such a survey it is to the East that the eye naturally turns, and there
especially to the singers of Israel; for, as to the view of Nature which
the Hindu Vedas may contain, this is a subject on which I do not venture,
since at best I could but repeat at second-hand what others have said.
In considering the views of Nature presented by Hebrew poetry, it is not
to the account of the creation in Genesis that we turn, but to the many
passages in the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job, in which the
aspects of the outward world, as they appeared to those old seers, are
delineated. Humboldt and many others have remarked that the description
by the Hebrew Poets of the material world everywhere reflects their faith
in the unity of God, and in his immediate presence in all creation. The
world is described, not so much in detail, but as a whole, in its vast
expanses and great movements; or, if individual objects are dwelt on, as
in the Book of Job, it is as the visible witnesses to the transcendent
power of the Invisible One. Nature is nowhere spoken of as an independent
and self-subsistent power, but rather as the outer chamber of an Unseen
Presence—a garment, a veil, which the Eternal One is ever ready to break
through. These characteristics, which pervade the entire poetry of the
Old Testament, are perhaps nowhere seen so condensed as in that crowning
hymn of the visible creation, the 104th Psalm.
This Psalm presents, as has often been remarked, a picture of the entire
Universe, which for completeness, for breadth, and for grandeur, is
unequaled in any other literature. Where else, in human language, shall
we find the whole Universe, the heavens and the earth, and the ongoings
of man in the midst of them, sketched, as here, in a “few bold strokes”?—
“The Lord covereth himself with light as with a garment. He hath
stretched the heavens like a canopy. He laid the foundation of the round
world that it should not be removed forever. The waters springing in the
mountains descend into the valleys, unto the places which the Lord hath
appointed for them, that they may never pass the bounds which He hath
set them. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the
hills, to give drink to every beast of the field, for the wild asses
to quench their thirst.... Beside them the birds of the air sing among
the branches.” The fruits of the field, too, are there; grass and green
herb; the labors of man, wine and oil of olive; all the creatures, the
conies, the wild goats, the lions roaring after their prey, and seeking
their meat from God. There, too, is the great and wide sea, and the
wondrous creatures it contains, and the heavenly bodies are rounding in
the whole. And then that touching contrast between the moving life of
the elements and the quiet yet laborious life of man, encompassed by
these vast movements,—“Man goeth forth unto his work and his labor until
the evening.” And all this picture of the Universe contained within
thirty-five short verses! Besides this, the special Psalm of the visible
creation, there is the 65th Psalm, and many another passage in the
Psalms, which describe so touchingly the way in which God deals with the
earth through natural processes.
Again, I need hardly refer to the Book of Job, especially from the 37th
to the 41st chapters, where both single appearances of the world and the
arrangement of the whole are depicted in language which has graven itself
on the heart of all nations: “The Lord walks on the heights of the sea,
on the ridges of the towering waves heaped up by the storm.” Or again:
“The morning dawn illumines the border of the earth, and moulds variously
the canopy of clouds as the hand of man moulds the ductile clay.”
Or turn again to the great poet-prophet Isaiah. Here you find no detailed
descriptions, but all Nature fused and molten before the intense fire,
now of his indignation, now of his adoring awe, now of his spiritual joy;
one moment lifting his eyes to the midnight heavens as the proof and
witness of the Divine Omnipotence; another, in his soul’s exultation over
God’s redemptive mercy, calling aloud to the heavens to sing, and the
lower parts of the earth to shout for joy, “Break forth into singing, ye
mountains, O forest and every tree therein.”
But this transport comes from no mere love of Nature. It has a deeper
origin. It is for that Jehovah hath comforted his people, and will have
mercy upon his afflicted. This is the solemn spiritual joy in which he
calls on the heavens and the earth to sympathize.
The following seem to be some of the chief notes of Hebrew poetry in its
dealing with Nature:—
1. Nature, as we have seen, is never represented as an independent power
or as resplendent with her own beauty, but as the direct creation,
one might almost say, the garment of the great Jehovah. In fact it is
remarkable that the word Nature, in the sense we now use it in, never
occurs in the Bible. Neither the word nor the thing, as a separate
entity, seems ever to have been present to the Hebrew mind. In everything
they saw or heard God himself as immediately present, ready as it were to
rend the veil and manifest himself.
2. The sober, truthful estimate of all things in the external world.
They are spoken of exactly as they are. There is no temptation to make
too much of them; for He who is behind them and who made them is so
much greater, so much more present to thought, that reverence for Him
precludes exaggeration. The accuracy of the Bible descriptions of these
things is quite unexampled in other literature.[13] This faithfulness to
fact, this veneration for natural truth, this feeling that things are too
sacred to be exaggerated or distorted, or in any way trifled with, comes
directly from the habit of regarding all visible Nature as created and
continually upheld by One Omnipresent God. Habitual reverence for Him
from whom they come sobers the writers and makes them truthful.
3. Connected with this is the absence of all tendency to theorize or
frame hypotheses about Nature’s ongoings. This of course comes from
the pervading habit of referring all effects directly to the Divine
will; and yet there is no want of philosophic wonder, for, as Humboldt
remarks, the Book of Job proposes many questions about natural things
“which modern science enables us to propound more formally, and to clothe
in more scientific language, but not to solve satisfactorily.” Lastly,
there is a deep-hearted pathos, “a yearning pensiveness,” as it has been
called, in the Hebrew poetry, over man’s mortal condition, as when in
images straight from Nature it describes his life here as “a wind that
passeth away and cometh not again,” or “as a flower of the field so he
flourisheth, for the wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place
thereof shall know it no more.” Simple images, yet how true for all
generations!
HOMER.
When we turn from the Hebrew to the Greek poetry, as represented by
the father of it, Homer, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. It
is not merely that in the regard which the great poet casts on Nature,
mythology, a fading and only half-alive mythology, still lingered. It
is not this only, but it is that in his thoughts of Nature there is not
the same awful reverence, the same profound pathos; but there is more of
the artistic sense of beauty, that artistic sense which is only fully
developed when the profounder feelings are comparatively laid asleep.
No land known to the ancients, perhaps I might say no land ever known
to men, has supplied such visual stimulus to the imagination as
Greece;—scenery so richly diversified, a land beyond all others various
in features and elements, mountains with their bases plunged into the
sea, valleys intersected by great rivers, rich plains and meadows inlaid
between the hill-ranges, deeply indented shores, promontories wood-clad
or temple-crowned looking out on the many-islanded, Ægean;—around it, on
every side, seas so beautiful, above it such a canopy of sky, changing
through every hour and every season, and calling forth from sea and land
every color which sunlight and gloom can elicit.
If of all nations the Greeks were endowed with the keenest sensibility to
beauty, and if Homer was their chief and representative poet, it could
hardly be but that scenery so varied should melt into his imagination and
reflect itself in his poetry. And so it is. Homer lived most probably
on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where he had ever before his eye the
island-studded Ægean, behind him the rich valleys opening down to the
coast, and eastward the great mountain ranges where these rivers are
cradled; could it be that of all this his poetry should give no sign?
I cannot agree with Mr. Ruskin’s criticism of the Homeric scenery. You
will find it in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” chapter xiii.,
on Classical Landscape. Like everything which Mr. Ruskin writes, it is
interesting and suggestive, but I cannot think it adequate or wholly
true. Of the Greeks he says: “They shrank with dread or hatred from
all the ruggedness of lower nature—from the wrinkled forest bark and
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.” Again he says: “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.” Again: “It is sufficiently
notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells
delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the
inhabitants of mountainous countries do; but the inhabitants of the
plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.”
Now, in this passage, the general assertion seems to be much too
sweeping, and, in the special instance of Homer, I think it is not true.
Mr. Ruskin backs his position by reference to various passages in the
Odyssey which seem to bear him out, but in any fair estimate we must take
in the Iliad as well as the Odyssey.
In the Iliad the descriptions of Nature are not so detailed as in the
Odyssey. Indeed, they occur almost entirely in similes; but these the
poet fetches from every realm and feature of Nature—from the mountain,
the forest, the sea, especially as seen darkening under the coming of
the western breeze; from the cloudy and the midnight sky; from all kinds
of wild animals, the lion, the fawn, the hawk, and the boar. In his
battle-scenes it is to all the sterner and fiercer aspects of Nature,
and habits of wild beasts, that he has recourse for his comparisons. And
would he have so often invoked the aid of these wild forces and creatures
of his imagination had not he delighted in them?
So when Teucer slays Mentor, it is thus, as rendered by Lord Derby:—
“Down he fell,
As by the woodman’s axe, on some high peak
Falls a proud ash, conspicuous from afar,
Leveling its tender leaves upon the ground.”
It is thus the charge of Hector is described when he beat back the Greeks
and penned them at their ships:—
“On poured the Trojan masses; in the van
Hector straight forward drove in full career.
As some huge bowlder, from its rocky bed
Detached, and by the wintry torrent’s force
Hurled down the steep cliff’s face, when constant rains
The massive rock’s firm hold have undermined;
With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood
Resounds beneath it; still it hurries on,
Until, arriving at the level plain,
Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more.”
Or take another similitude drawn from the sea. When the poet wishes to
describe how the Achæan phalanxes come on to battle, this is the image he
employs:—
“And as a goatherd from his watch-tower crag
Beholds a cloud advancing o’er the sea
Beneath the west wind’s breath; as from afar
He gazes, black as pitch, it sweeps along
O’er the dark face of ocean, bearing on
A hurricane of rain; he, shuddering, sees
And drives his flock beneath the sheltering cave.
So thick and dark about the Argives stirred,
Impatient for the war, the stalwart youths,
Black masses, bristling close with spear and shield.”
Or again, when, after Agamemnon has retired wounded from the battle,
Hector comes forth and slips his Trojans on the Achæan host, as some
hunter slips his white-teethed hounds on a wild boar or a lion, and
himself
“Fell on their battle, as some roaring storm
Leaps down and heaves the sleeping violet sea.”
One after another he lays low the chiefs, and their names fill three
hexameters.
“Of the leaders these
He slew, then on the nameless people fell
As when with hurricane deep the west wind smites
White summer clouds high piled by the clear south,
And volumed wave on wave comes shoreward rolled,
And the white flying foam is scattered high
Before the loud blast of far-wandering wind.”
Let me now give one instance of Homer’s feeling for the aspect of the
nightly heavens. It shall be taken from the place of the Iliad where the
Trojans, after a day of successful battle, having driven back the Greeks,
rest for the night. And here I shall quote, not, as in the above passage,
from Lord Derby’s translation, but from a rendering of the passage by
the Poet-Laureate. It is the only passage of Homer in which we have the
Laureate’s handiwork:—
“So Hector said, and sea-like roared his host,
Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke,
And each beside his chariot bound his own,
And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep
In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine
And bread from out their houses brought, and heaped
Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain
Rolled the rich vapor far into the heaven.
And there all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying, many a fire before them blazed;
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart;
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy.
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And champing golden grain the horses stood
Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn.”
These few samples of the similes scattered thick throughout the Iliad
show that Homer laid all the appearances of Nature under contribution,
and the wildest and grandest not less than those that are home-like.
True it is that Homer in the Iliad nowhere stops to paint scenery for
its own sake. He does this less than Virgil or most later epic poets.
He is so full of business and of human action that he cannot stay for
description. But in such passages as the Catalogue of the Grecian Host
in the second book, there are brief but fine touches of geographical
landscape, as he tells of the many lands whence they came; or again in
his fixed but most suggestive epithets of places, as “the windy Ilion,”
“many-fountained Ida,” and the deep-whirlpooled Scamander; Lacedæmon in
the hollow of the hills; Messe, haunt of wild doves; vine-clad Epidaurus;
windy Enerpe; Orchomenus rich in flocks.
I would that I could linger over this subject and quote some more
passages, such as that where Achilles, long absent, returns to the
conflict, and the immortal gods come down to range themselves, some with
the Greeks, some on the side of Troy; and heaven and earth, the mountains
and the rivers and the sea and the nether world beneath, all are moved to
take part in the great issue.
But I must pass on to the scenery of the Odyssey. No doubt this poem
contains much more description of landscape than the Iliad, and in that
description, as Mr. Ruskin says, there seems to be a preference for
the tame and domestic rather than for the wild in Nature. But is there
not enough in the subject and circumstance of the two poems to account
for such difference? Ulysses, the much-traveled, much-suffering man,
who had endured so many things by land and sea, his home-sick heart is
yearning for his native Ithaca. That his heart should be weary of the sea
and the mountains and all wild untractable things is only too natural.
It is quite in keeping with and as a set-off against this feeling of
home-weariness that the poet, in describing such a wanderer, should dwell
with peculiar emphasis on all that is warm and comfortable and home-like
in scenery.
Let me give one or two samples from Worsley’s translation of the
Odyssey, which I am disposed to think is the best poetic translation of
any classical poet that we have in English. Mr. Worsley rendered the
hexameters of Homer into the Spenserian stanza, and he so perfectly
caught the whole rhythm and cadence of Spenser, and this answers so well
to the spirit of the Odyssey, the most romantic of Greek poems, that I
know no more delightful reading than those picturesque and melodious
stanzas.
Here is one sample. Ulysses, having left Calypso’s island on a raft, is
shipwrecked in mid-seas, and this is the description of his coming to
land on the island of Phæacia:—
“Two nights and days in the tumultuous swell
He wandered. Often did his heart forebode
Utter extinction in the yawning hell,
But when the fair-haired Dawn arising glowed,
And in the eastern heaven the thin light showed,
Came a calm-deepening day, windless and clear.
Then when Odysseus on a tall wave rode,
And his keen eyes along the heaving mere
Stretched in extreme desire, he saw the land rise near.
“As when a father, on the point to die,
Who for long time in sore disease hath lain,
By the strong Fates tormented heavily,
Till the pulse faileth for exceeding pain,
Feels the life stirring in his bones again;
While glad at heart his children smile around,
He also smiles—the gods have loosed his chain;
So welcome seemed the land with forest crowned,
And he rejoicing swam, and yearned to feel the ground.
“But now within a voice-throw of the rocks
The sound of waters did his ears appall.
Full on the coast the great waves’ thunder-shocks
Roll, and afar the wet foam-vapors fall.
No roadstead there, no haven seemed at all,
Nor shelter where a ship might rest at ease;
But from the main-earth darted a wild wall
Of headlands. Then Odysseus’ heart and knees
Were loosened; and his soul thus spake in the deep seas.”
Then follows a fine description of his struggle with the breakers, and
how his flesh was torn and his skin peeled against the sharp rocks:—
“He from the echoing breakers swam right fain,
Skirting the coast; if chance his eyes explore
Or far or near some haven of the main,
Or mild declivity of shelving shore.
But when he came the river-month before,
And his gaze rested on the long white gleam,
By rocks unchafed and windless evermore,
Here to his thought best landing-place did seem,
And in his soul he prayed, feeling the calm sweet stream.”
Then the landing and climbing up into the wood, and hiding himself under
a mound of gathered leaves:—
“Where o’er his weary head,
Athene all night long pain-healing slumber shed.”
But I recommend every one to read the last hundred lines of the fifth
book of the Odyssey. It is one of the most natural and beautiful
descriptions of sea-coast scenery, heightened in its interest by the
presence of man in strife with the waters, that is to be found in any
poet.
The whole of this passage is commented on by Mr. Ruskin at length, but I
think his comments are one-sided and overdone. No doubt the shipwrecked
man kisses the corn-growing land when at last he reaches it, and gladly
covers himself with the dead leaves. But it is not, as Mr. Ruskin says,
that the Greek mind shrank from wild things, and took pleasure only in
things subservient to human use. It is because it was the action natural
to a shipwrecked man just escaped from the hateful sea to hug the land he
had so much toil to reach; and it was natural for a poet, when describing
his hero tossed and drenched for days amid the hungry foam, to bring
out in strong contrast all the warmth and comfort of the dry cheerful
earth.[14]
One sample of Homer’s home-painting must be given, where we see—
“All things are in order stored—
A home of ancient peace;”—
“Outside the court-yard stretched a planted space
Of orchard, and a fence environed all the place.
“There, in full prime, the orchard-trees grew tall,
Sweet-fig, pomegranate, apple fruited fair,
Pear and the healthful olive. Each and all
Both summer droughts and chills of winter spare.
All the year round they flourish. Some the air
Of zephyr warms to life, some doth mature,
Apple grows old on apple, pear on pear,
Fig follows fig, vintage doth vintage lure;
Thus the rich revolution doth for age endure.
“With well-sunned floor for drying, there is seen
The vineyard. Here the grapes they cull, there tread.
Here falls the blossom from the clusters green,
There the first blushings by the suns are shed.
Last, flowers forever fadeless, bed by bed;
Two streams: one waters the whole garden fair;
One through the court-yard, near the house is led,
Whereto with pitcher all the folk repair.
All these the God-sent gifts to King Alcinous were.”
I might go on to quote the description of Calypso’s cave, and many
another landscape with which this Greek romance abounds. Indeed, it would
take a summer day to exhaust the passages descriptive of Nature in the
Odyssey and the Iliad alone, before we could arrive at an adequate idea
of the Homeric view of Nature. This only I will say and pass on—that
in the Odyssey you do find that the scenes most lovingly depicted are
home scenes of order, comfort, and repose. But this is not because, as
Mr. Ruskin says, the Greek mind abhorred the wildness of nature, but
because, with such a character to describe as Ulysses, battered by the
strokes of doom, travel-weary and home-sick, the natural framework to
such a human figure, that which gives at once contrast and relief, is a
setting taken from the reposeful side of Nature. Of storm and trouble
you have had enough in the human character. Nature here must furnish the
background of repose. But in the Iliad, if we look at the similes, we
find them taken from every form and aspect of Nature—the wild and vast
as well as the homely and the minute. The poet gathers images from every
element, earth, sky, and sea, mountain and meadow; but all are used, not
for their own sakes, not to dwell on themselves alone, but to bring out
by similitude the force of the human passions and actions, which are the
substance of the epic. But the poet who could so use Nature, making her a
storehouse of images whence he drew at will, must have lived familiarly
in the eye of Nature, loving her in all her aspects with a true though
unconscious love.