THE TROAD
METHLEY recovered almost suddenly, and we determined to go through the
Troad together.
My comrade was a capital Grecian. It is true that his singular mind so
ordered and disposed his classic lore as to impress it with something of
an original and barbarous character—with an almost Gothic quaintness,
more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of
Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an
unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian
gods, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old
Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I
believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good
deal of the practical sagacity
“Of a Yorkshireman hippodamoio,”
and this enabled him to apply his knowledge with much more tact than is
usually shown by people so learned as he.
I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar’s love. The most humble and
pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her
firstborn son no Watts’ hymns, no collects for the day; she could teach
him in earliest childhood no less than this, to find a home in his
saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is,
that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope
even, but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the
fire of Homer’s battles.
I pored over the _Odyssey_ as over a story-book, hoping and fearing for
the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the _Iliad_—line by line I
clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love. As an old
woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of the world to
come, so, as though it would fit me for the coming strife of this
temporal world, I read and read the _Iliad_. Even outwardly, it was not
like other books; it was throned in towering folios. There was a preface
or dissertation printed in type still more majestic than the rest of the
book; this I read, but not till my enthusiasm for the _Iliad_ had already
run high. The writer compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of
the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the _Iliad_ was
all in all to the human race—that it was history, poetry, revelation;
that the works of men’s hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away
like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure
for ever and ever.
I assented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to know
Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks, in the same
sense as an oil-and-colour man may be said to know something of painting;
but take an untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve months with any
translation of Homer, and he will be nearer by twenty centuries to the
spirit of old Greece; _he_ does not stop in the ninth year of the siege
to admire this or that group of words; _he_ has no books in his tent, but
he shares in vital counsels with the “king of men,” and knows the inmost
souls of the impending gods; how profanely he exults over the powers
divine when they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of
all, how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of
Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of
the Sixth Book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and
learning from pastors and masters how best to admire it. The impatient
child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex
him with their delays, and their talking; the mention of the nurse is
personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough
to be frightened at the nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that
he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of
Homer’s poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the
_Iliad_, that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his
mother’s shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he goes,
vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never remitting his
fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow—the new and
generous sorrow that he learns to feel when the noblest of all his foes
lies sadly dying at the Scæan gate.
Heroic days are these, but the dark ages of schoolboy life come closing
over them. I suppose it is all right in the end, yet, by Jove, at first
sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your mother’s
dressing-room to a buzzing school. You feel so keenly the delights of
early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere names
of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the
ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the
end of space; you vex the electric cylinder till it yields you, for your
toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you
know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of
the men who have saved whole empires from oblivion. What more will you
ever learn? Yet the dismal change is ordained, and then, thin meagre
Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds and patches of Greek,
is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore. Instead of
sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses,
dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages,
are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a
three-inch scrap of “Scriptores Romani,”—from Greek poetry down, down to
the cold rations of “Poetæ Græci,” cut up by commentators, and served out
by schoolmasters!
It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the
rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend forward
so longingly to the plains of Troy.
Away from our people and our horses, Methley and I went loitering along
by the willow banks of a stream that crept in quietness through the low,
even plain. There was no stir of weather overhead, no sound of rural
labour, no sign of life in the land; but all the earth was dead and
still, as though it had lain for thrice a thousand years under the leaden
gloom of one unbroken Sabbath.
Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and winding
along through its shifting pathway; in some places its waters were
parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could
see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels,
and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew that the springs
which fed it were high on Ida—the springs of Simois and Scamander!
It was coldly and thanklessly, and with vacant, unsatisfied eyes that I
watched the slow coming and gliding away of the waters. I tell myself
now, as a profane fact, that I did stand by that river (Methley gathered
some seeds from the bushes that grew there), but since that I am away
from his banks, “divine Scamander” has recovered the proper mystery
belonging to him as an unseen deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that
which belongs to far antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the
winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One’s mind regains in
absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their
rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a
mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion,
rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready
for some sort of half-expected rapture are chilled, and borne down for
the time under all this load of real earth and water; but let these once
pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored,
and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown
back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon
such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to
mythology.
It is not over the plain before Troy that the river now flows; its waters
have edged away far towards the north, since the day that “divine
Scamander” (whom the gods call Xanthus) went down to do battle for Ilion,
“with Mars, and Phoebus, and Latona, and Diana glorying in her arrows,
and Venus the lover of smiles.”
And now, when I was vexed at the migration of Scamander, and the total
loss or absorption of poor dear Simois, how happily Methley reminded me
that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes! The Greeks in
beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due to the gods, and so
after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow
from Ida, and sent them flooding over the wall, till all the beach was
smooth and free from the unhallowed works of the Greeks. It is true I
see now, on looking to the passage, that Neptune, when the work of
destruction was done, turned back the rivers to their ancient ways:
“ . . . ποταμους δ᾽ ετρεψε νεεσθαι
Καρ᾽ ροον ήπερ προσθεν ιεν καλλιρροον ὑδωρ,”
but their old channels passing through that light pervious soil would
have been lost in the nine days’ flood, and perhaps the god, when he
willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient beds, may have done his
work but ill: it is easier, they say, to destroy than it is to restore.
We took to our horses again, and went southward towards the very plain
between Troy and the tents of the Greeks, but we rode by a line at some
distance from the shore. Whether it was that the lay of the ground
hindered my view towards the sea, or that I was all intent upon Ida, or
whether my mind was in vacancy, or whether, as is most like, I had
strayed from the Dardan plains all back to gentle England, there is now
no knowing, nor caring, but it was not quite suddenly indeed, but rather,
as it were, in the swelling and falling of a single wave, that the
reality of that very sea-view, which had bounded the sight of the Greeks,
now visibly acceded to me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive
how deeply that eternal coastline, that fixed horizon, those island
rocks, must have graven their images upon the minds of the Grecian
warriors by the time that they had reached the ninth year of the siege!
conceive the strength, and the fanciful beauty, of the speeches with
which a whole army of imagining men must have told their weariness, and
how the sauntering chiefs must have whelmed that daily, daily scene with
their deep Ionian curses!
And now it was that my eyes were greeted with a delightful surprise.
Whilst we were at Constantinople, Methley and I had pored over the map
together. We agreed that whatever may have been the exact site of Troy,
the Grecian camp must have been nearly opposite to the space betwixt the
islands of Imbros and Tenedos,
“Μεσσηγυς Τενεδοιο και Ιμβρου παιπαλοεσσης,”
but Methley reminded me of a passage in the _Iliad_ in which Neptune is
represented as looking at the scene of action before Ilion from above the
island of Samothrace. Now Samothrace, according to the map, appeared to
be not only out of all seeing distance from the Troad, but to be entirely
shut out from it by the intervening Imbros, which is a larger island,
stretching its length right athwart the line of sight from Samothrace to
Troy. Piously allowing that the dread Commoter of our globe might have
seen all mortal doings, even from the depth of his own cerulean kingdom,
I still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see the
fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse from all
haziness and overreaching, would have _meant_ to give the god for his
station some spot within reach of men’s eyes from the plains of Troy. I
think that this testing of the poet’s words by map and compass may have
shaken a little of my faith in the completeness of his knowledge. Well,
now I had come; there to the south was Tenedos, and here at my side was
Imbros, all right, and according to the map, but aloft over Imbros, aloft
in a far-away heaven, was Samothrace, the watch-tower of Neptune!
So Homer had appointed it, and so it was; the map was correct enough, but
could not, like Homer, convey _the whole truth_. Thus vain and false are
the mere human surmises and doubts which clash with Homeric writ!
Nobody whose mind had not been reduced to the most deplorable logical
condition could look upon this beautiful congruity betwixt the _Iliad_
and the material world and yet bear to suppose that the poet may have
learned the features of the coast from mere hearsay; now then, I
believed; now I knew that Homer had _passed along here_, that this vision
of Samothrace over-towering the nearer island was common to him and to
me.
After a journey of some few days by the route of Adramiti and Pergamo we
reached Smyrna. The letters which Methley here received obliged him to
return to England.