Does it reside perchance in some primitive instinct of _taboo_;
of a superstition of fetish-worship fencing off sacred things as
unmentionable, and reinforced by the bad Puritan notion that holy
things are by no means to be enjoyed?
If so, I begin by referring you to the Greeks and their attitude
towards the Homeric poems. We, of course, hold the Old Testament
more sacred than Homer. But I very much doubt if it be more
sacred to us than the Iliad and the Odyssey were to an old
Athenian, in his day. To the Greeks--and to forget this is the
fruitfullest source of error in dealing with the Tragedians or
even with Aristophanes--to the Greeks, their religion, such as it
was, mattered enormously. They built their Theatre upon it, as we
most certainly do not; which means that it had sunk into their
daily life and permeated their enjoyment of it, as our religion
certainly does not affect _our_ life to enhance it as amusing or
pleasurable. We go to Church on Sunday, and write it off as an
observance; but if eager to be happy with a free heart, we close
early and steal a few hours from the working-day. We antagonise
religion and enjoyment, worship and holiday. Nature being too
strong for any convention of ours, courtship has asserted
itself as permissible on the Sabbath, if not as a Sabbatical
institution.
Now the Greeks were just as much slaves to the letter of their
Homer as any Auld Licht Elder to the letter of St Paul. No one
will accuse Plato of being overfriendly to poetry. Yet I believe
you will find in Plato some 150 direct citations from Homer, not
to speak of allusions scattered broadcast through the dialogues,
often as texts for long argument. Of these citations and
allusions an inordinate number seem to us laboriously trivial--
that is to say, unless we put ourselves into the Hellenic mind.
On the other hand Plato uses others to enforce or illustrate his
profoundest doctrines. For an instance, in "Phaedo" (§ 96)
Socrates is arguing that the soul cannot be one with the harmony
of the bodily affections, being herself the master-player who
commands the strings:
'--almost always' [he says] opposing and coercing them in all
sorts of ways throughout life, sometimes more violently with the
pains of medicine and gymnastic; then again more gently;--
threatening, and also reprimanding the desires, passions, fears,
as if talking to a thing which is not herself; as Homer in the
Odyssey represents Odysseus doing in the words
[Greek: stethos de plexas kradien enipape mutho:
tetlathi de, kradie; kai kynteron allo pot etles]
He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart:
Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured.
Do you think [asks Socrates] that Homer wrote this under the idea
that the soul is a harmony capable of being led by the affections
of the body, and not rather of a nature which should lead and
master them--herself a far diviner thing than any harmony?
A Greek, then, will use Homer--_his_ Bible--minutely on niceties
of conduct or broadly on first principles of philosophy or
religion. But equally, since it is poetry all the time to him, he
will take--or to instance particular writers, Aristotle and the
late Greek, Longinus will take--a single hexameter to illustrate
a minute trick of style or turn of phrase, as equally he will
choose a long passage or the whole "Iliad," the whole "Odyssey,"
to illustrate a grand rule of poetic construction, a first
principle of aesthetics. For an example--'Herein,' says
Aristotle, starting to show that an Epic poem must have Unity of
Subject--'Herein, to repeat what we have said before, we have a
further proof of Homer's superiority to the rest. He did not
attempt to deal even with the Trojan War in its entirety, though
it was a whole story with a definite beginning, middle and end--
feeling apparently that it was too long a story to be taken in at
one view or else over-complicated by variety of incidents.' And
as Aristotle takes the "Iliad"--_his_ Bible--to illustrate a
grand rule of poetical construction, so the late writer of his
tradition--Longinus--will use it to exhibit the core and essence
of poetical sublimity; as in his famous ninth chapter, of which
Gibbon wrote:
The ninth chapter ... {of the [Greek: PERI UPSOUS] or "De
Sublimitate" of Longinus} is one of the finest monuments of
antiquity. Till now, I was acquainted only with two ways of
criticising a beautiful passage: the one, to show, by an exact
anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of it, and whence they
sprung; the other, an idle exclamation, or a general
encomium, which leaves nothing behind it. Longinus has
shown me that there is a third. He tells me his own feelings
upon reading it; and tells them with so much energy, that he
communicates them. I almost doubt which is more sublime,
Homer's Battle of the Gods, or Longinus's Apostrophe to
Terentianus upon it.
Well, let me quote you, in translation, a sentence or two from
this chapter, which produced upon Gibbon such an effect as almost
to anticipate Walter Pater's famous definition, 'To feel the
virtue of the poet, of the painter, to disengage it, to set it
forth--these are the three stages of the critic's duty.'
'Elsewhere,' says Longinus, 'I have written as follows:
_Sublimity is the echo of a great soul._'
'Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.'--It was worth repeating
too--was it not?
For it is not possible that men with mean and servile ideas and
aims prevailing throughout their lives should produce anything
that is admirable and worthy of immortality. Great accents we
expect to fall from the lips of those whose thoughts are deep
and grave.... Hear how magnificently Homer speaks of the higher
powers: 'As far as a man seeth with his eyes into the haze of
distance as he sitteth upon a cliff of outlook and gazeth over
the wine-dark sea, even so far at a bound leap the neighing
horses of the Gods.'
'He makes' [says Longinus] 'the vastness of the world the
measure of their leap.' Then, after a criticism of the Battle of
the Gods (too long to be quoted here) he goes on:
Much superior to the passages respecting the Battle of the
Gods are those which represent the divine nature as it really
is--pure and great and undefiled; for example, what is said of
Poseidon.
Her far-stretching ridges, her forest-trees, quaked in dismay,
And her peaks, and the Trojans' town, and the ships of Achaia's
array,
Beneath his immortal feet, as onward Poseidon strode.
Then over the surges he drave: leapt, sporting before the God,
Sea-beasts that uprose all round from the depths, for their king
they knew,
And for rapture the sea was disparted, and onward the car-steeds
flew[1].
Then how does Longinus conclude? Why, very strangely--very
strangely indeed, whether you take the treatise to be by that
Longinus, the Rhetorician and Zenobia's adviser, whom the Emperor
Aurelian put to death, or prefer to believe it the work of an
unknown hand in the first century. The treatise goes on:
Similarly, the legislator of the Jews [Moses], no ordinary
man, having formed and expressed a worthy conception of
the might of the Godhead, writes at the very beginning of his
Laws, 'God said'--What? 'Let there be light, and there was
light'