OF CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE.
Sec. 1. My reason for asking the reader to give so much of his time to
the examination of the pathetic fallacy was, that, whether in
literature or in art, he will find it eminently characteristic of
the modern mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art,
he will also find the modern painter endeavoring to express
something which he, as a living creature, imagines in the lifeless
object, while the classical and mediaeval painters were content with
expressing the unimaginary and actual qualities of the object
itself. It will be observed that, according to the principle stated
long ago, I use the words painter and poet quite indifferently,
including in our inquiry the landscape of literature, as well as
that of painting; and this the more because the spirit of classical
landscape has hardly been expressed in any other way than by words.
Sec. 2. Taking, therefore, this wide field, it is surely a very notable
circumstance, to begin with, that this pathetic fallacy is eminently
characteristic of modern painting. For instance, Keats, describing a
wave, breaking, out at sea, says of it--
"Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence."
That is quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner. The idea
of the peculiar action with which foam rolls down a long, large wave
could not have been given by any other words so well as by this
"wayward indolence." But Homer would never have written, never
thought of, such words. He could not by any possibility have lost
sight of the great fact that the wave, from the beginning to the end
of it, do what it might, was still nothing else than salt water; and
that salt water could not be either wayward or indolent. He will
call the waves "over-roofed," "full-charged," "monstrous,"
"compact-black," "dark-clear," "violet-colored," "wine-colored," and
so on. But every one of these epithets is descriptive of pure
physical nature. "Over-roofed" is the term he invariably uses of
anything--rock, house, or wave--that nods over at the brow; the
other terms need no explanation; they are as accurate and intense in
truth as words can be, but they never show the slightest feeling of
anything animated in the ocean. Black or clear, monstrous or
violet-colored, cold salt water it is always, and nothing but that.
Sec. 3. "Well, but the modern writer, by his admission of the tinge of
fallacy, has given an idea of something in the action of the wave
which Homer could not, and surely, therefore, has made a step in
advance? Also there appears to be a degree of sympathy and feeling
in the one writer, which there is not in the other; and as it has
been received for a first principle that writers are great in
proportion to the intensity of their feelings, and Homer seems to
have no feelings about the sea but that it is black and deep, surely
in this respect also the modern writer is the greater?"
Stay a moment. Homer _had_ some feeling about the sea; a faith in
the animation of it much stronger than Keats's. But all this sense
of something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great
abstract image of a Sea Power. He never says the waves rage, or the
waves are idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than,
the waves, which rages, and is idle, and _that_ he calls a god.
Sec. 4. I do not think we ever enough endeavor to enter into what a
Greek's real notion of a god was. We are so accustomed to the modern
mockeries of the classical religion, so accustomed to hear and see
the Greek gods introduced as living personages, or invoked for help,
by men who believe neither in them nor in any other gods, that we
seem to have infected the Greek ages themselves with the breath, and
dimmed them with the shade, of our hypocrisy; and are apt to think
that Homer, as we know that Pope, was merely an ingenious fabulist;
nay, more than this, that all the nations of past time were
ingenious fabulists also, to whom the universe was a lyrical drama,
and by whom whatsoever was said about it was merely a witty
allegory, or a graceful lie, of which the entire upshot and
consummation was a pretty statue in the middle of the court, or at
the end of the garden.
This, at least, is one of our forms of opinion about Greek faith; not,
indeed, possible altogether to any man of honesty or ordinary powers
of thought; but still so venomously inherent in the modern philosophy
that all the pure lightning of Carlyle cannot as yet quite burn it out
of any of us. And then, side by side with this mere infidel folly,
stands the bitter short-sightedness of Puritanism, holding the
classical god to be either simply an idol,--a block of stone
ignorantly, though sincerely, worshipped,--or else an actual diabolic
or betraying power, usurping the place of god.
Sec. 5. Both these Puritanical estimates of Greek deity are of course
to some extent true. The corruption of classical worship is barren
idolatry; and that corruption was deepened, and variously directed
to their own purposes, by the evil angels. But this was neither the
whole, nor the principal part, of Pagan worship. Pallas was not, in
the pure Greek mind, merely a powerful piece of ivory in a temple at
Athens; neither was the choice of Leonidas between the alternatives
granted him by the oracle, of personal death, or ruin to his
country, altogether a work of the Devil's prompting.
Sec. 6. What, then, was actually the Greek god? In what way were these
two ideas of human form, and divine power, credibly associated in
the ancient heart, so as to become a subject of true faith,
irrespective equally of fable, allegory, superstitious trust in
stone, and demoniacal influence?
It seems to me that the Greek had exactly the same instinctive
feeling about the elements that we have ourselves; that to Homer, as
much as to Casimir de la Vigne, fire seemed ravenous and pitiless;
to Homer, as much as to Keats, the sea-wave appeared wayward or
idle, or whatever else it may be to the poetical passion. But then
the Greek reasoned upon this sensation, saying to himself: "I can
light the fire, and put it out; I can dry this water up, or drink
it. It cannot be the fire or the water that rages, or that is
wayward. But it must be something _in_ this fire and _in_ the water,
which I cannot destroy by extinguishing the one, or evaporating the
other, any more than I destroy myself by cutting off my finger; _I_
was _in_ my finger,--something of me at least was; I had a power
over it, and felt pain in it, though I am still as much myself when
it is gone. So there may be a power in the water which is not water,
but to which the water is as a body;--which can strike with it, move
in it, suffer in it, yet not be destroyed in it. This something,
this great Water Spirit, I must not confuse with the waves, which
are only its body. _They_ may flow hither and thither, increase or
diminish. _That_ must be indivisible--imperishable--a god. So of
fire also; those rays which I can stop, and in the midst of which I
cast a shadow, cannot be divine, nor greater than I. They cannot
feel, but there may be something in them that feels,--a glorious
intelligence, as much nobler and more swift than mine, as these
rays, which are its body, are nobler and swifter than my flesh;--the
spirit of all light, and truth, and melody, and revolving hours."
Sec. 7. It was easy to conceive, farther, that such spirits should be
able to assume at will a human form, in order to hold intercourse
with men, or to perform any act for which their proper body, whether
fire, earth, or air, was unfitted. And it would have been to place
them beneath, instead of above, humanity, if, assuming the form of
man, they could not also have tasted his pleasures. Hence the easy
step to the more or less material ideas of deities, which are apt at
first to shock us, but which are indeed only dishonorable so far as
they represent the gods as false and unholy. It is not the
materialism, but the vice, which degrades the conception; for the
materialism itself is never positive or complete. There is always
some sense of exaltation in the spiritual and immortal body; and of
a power proceeding from the visible form through all the infinity of
the element ruled by the particular god. The precise nature of the
idea is well seen in the passage of the Iliad which describes the
river Scamander defending the Trojans against Achilles. In order to
remonstrate with the hero, the god assumes a human form, which
nevertheless is in some way or other instantly recognized by
Achilles as that of the river-god: it is addressed at once as a
river, not as a man; and its voice is the voice of a river, "out of
the deep whirlpools."[59] Achilles refuses to obey its commands; and
from the human form it returns instantly into its natural or divine
one, and endeavors to overwhelm him with waves. Vulcan defends
Achilles, and sends fire against the river, which suffers in its
water-body, till it is able to bear no more. At last even the "nerve
of the river," or "strength of the river" (note the expression),
feels the fire, and this "strength of the river" addresses Vulcan in
supplications for respite. There is in this precisely the idea of a
vital part of the river-body, which acted and felt, and which, if
the fire reached it, was death, just as would be the case if it
touched a vital part of the human body. Throughout the passage the
manner of conception is perfectly clear and consistent; and if, in
other places, the exact connection between the ruling spirit and the
thing ruled is not so manifest, it is only because it is almost
impossible for the human mind to dwell long upon such subjects
without falling into inconsistencies, and gradually slackening its
effort to grasp the entire truth; until the more spiritual part of
it slips from its hold, and only the human form of the god is left,
to be conceived and described as subject to all the errors of
humanity. But I do not believe that the idea ever weakens itself
down to mere allegory. When Pallas is said to attack and strike down
Mars, it does not mean merely that Wisdom at that moment prevailed
against Wrath. It means that there are indeed two great spirits, one
entrusted to guide the human soul to wisdom and chastity, the other
to kindle wrath and prompt to battle. It means that these two
spirits, on the spot where, and at the moment when, a great contest
was to be decided between all that they each governed in man, then
and there assumed human form, and human weapons, and did verily and
materially strike at each other, until the Spirit of Wrath was
crushed. And when Diana is said to hunt with her nymphs in the
woods, it does not mean merely as Wordsworth puts it, that the poet
or shepherd saw the moon and stars glancing between the branches of
the trees, and wished to say so figuratively. It means that there
is a living spirit, to which the light of the moon is a body; which
takes delight in glancing between the clouds and following the wild
beasts as they wander through the night; and that this spirit
sometimes assumes a perfect human form, and in this form, with real
arrows, pursues and slays the wild beasts, which with its mere
arrows of moonlight it could not slay; retaining, nevertheless, all
the while, its power, and being in the moonlight, and in all else
that it rules.
Sec. 8. There is not the smallest inconsistency or unspirituality in
this conception. If there were, it would attach equally to the
appearance of the angels to Jacob, Abraham, Joshua, or Manoah. In
all those instances the highest authority which governs our own
faith requires us to conceive divine power clothed with a human form
(a form so real that it is recognized for superhuman only by its
"doing wondrously"), and retaining, nevertheless, sovereignty and
omnipresence in all the world. This is precisely, as I understand
it, the heathen idea of a God; and it is impossible to comprehend
any single part of the Greek mind until we grasp this faithfully,
not endeavoring to explain it away in any wise, but accepting, with
frank decision and definition, the tangible existence of its
deities;--blue-eyed--white-fleshed--human-hearted,--capable at their
choice of meeting man absolutely in his own nature--feasting with
him--talking with him--fighting with him, eye to eye, or breast to
breast, as Mars with Diomed; or else, dealing with him in a more
retired spirituality, as Apollo sending the plague upon the Greeks,
when his quiver rattles at his shoulders as he moves, and yet the
darts sent forth of it strike not as arrows, but as plague; or,
finally, retiring completely into the material universe which they
properly inhabit, and dealing with man through that, as Scamander
with Achilles through his waves.
Sec. 9. Nor is there anything whatever in the various actions recorded of
the gods, however apparently ignoble, to indicate weakness of belief
in them. Very frequently things which appear to us ignoble are merely
the simplicities of a pure and truthful age. When Juno beats Diana
about the ears with her own quiver, for instance, we start at first,
as if Homer could not have believed that they were both real
goddesses. But what should Juno have done? Killed Diana with a look?
Nay, she neither wished to do so, nor could she have done so, by the
very faith of Diana's goddess-ship. Diana is as immortal as herself.
Frowned Diana into submission? But Diana has come expressly to try
conclusions with her, and will by no means be frowned into submission.
Wounded her with a celestial lance? That sounds more poetical, but it
is in reality partly more savage, and partly more absurd, than Homer.
More savage, for it makes Juno more cruel, therefore less divine; and
more absurd, for it only seems elevated in tone, because we use the
word "celestial," which means nothing. What sort of a thing is a
"celestial" lance? Not a wooden one. Of what then? Of moonbeams, or
clouds, or mist. Well, therefore, Diana's arrows were of mist too; and
her quiver, and herself, and Juno, with her lance, and all, vanish
into mist. Why not have said at once, if that is all you mean, that
two mists met, and one drove the other back? That would have been
rational and intelligible, but not to talk of celestial lances. Homer
had no such misty fancy; he believed the two goddesses were there in
true bodies, with true weapons, on the true earth; and still I ask,
what should Juno have done? Not beaten Diana? No; for it is
un-lady-like. Un-English-lady-like, yes; but by no means
un-Greek-lady-like, nor even un-natural-lady-like. If a modern lady
does _not_ beat her servant or her rival about the ears, it is oftener
because she is too weak, or too proud, than because she is of purer
mind than Homer's Juno. She will not strike them; but she will
overwork the one or slander the other without pity; and Homer would
not have thought that one whit more goddess-like than striking them
with her open hand.
Sec. 10. If, however, the reader likes to suppose that while the two
goddesses in personal presence thus fought with arrow and quiver,
there was also a broader and vaster contest supposed by Homer
between the elements they ruled; and that the goddess of the
heavens, as she struck the goddess of the moon on the flushing
cheek, was at the same instant exercising omnipresent power in the
heavens themselves, and gathering clouds, with which, filled with
the moon's own arrows or beams, she was encumbering and concealing
the moon; he is welcome to this out-carrying of the idea, provided
that he does not pretend to make it an interpretation instead of a
mere extension, nor think to explain away my real, running,
beautiful beaten Diana, into a moon behind clouds.[60]
Sec. 11. It is only farther to be noted, that the Greek conception of
Godhead, as it was much more real than we usually suppose, so it was
much more bold and familiar than to a modern mind would be possible.
I shall have something more to observe, in a little while, of the
danger of our modern habit of endeavoring to raise ourselves to
something like comprehension of the truth of divinity, instead of
simply believing the words in which the Deity reveals Himself to us.
The Greek erred rather on the other side, making hardly any effort
to conceive divine mind as above the human; and no more shrinking
from frank intercourse with a divine being, or dreading its
immediate presence, than that of the simplest of mortals. Thus
Atrides, enraged at his sword's breaking in his hand upon the helmet
of Paris, after he had expressly invoked the assistance of Jupiter,
exclaims aloud, as he would to a king who had betrayed him, "Jove,
Father, there is not another god more evil-minded than thou!" and
Helen, provoked at Paris's defeat, and oppressed with pouting shame
both for him and for herself, when Venus appears at her side, and
would lead her back to the delivered Paris, impatiently tells the
goddess to "go and take care of Paris herself."
Sec. 12. The modern mind is naturally, but vulgarly and unjustly,
shocked by this kind of familiarity. Rightly understood, it is not
so much a sign of misunderstanding of the divine nature as of good
understanding of the human. The Greek lived, in all things, a
healthy, and, in a certain degree, a perfect life. He had no morbid
or sickly feeling of any kind. He was accustomed to face death
without the slightest shrinking, to undergo all kinds of bodily
hardship without complaint, and to do what he supposed right and
honorable, in most cases, as a matter of course. Confident of his
own immortality, and of the power of abstract justice, he expected
to be dealt with in the next world as was right, and left the
matter much in his gods' hands; but being thus immortal, and finding
in his own soul something which it seemed quite as difficult to
master, as to rule the elements, he did not feel that it was an
appalling superiority in those gods to have bodies of water, or
fire, instead of flesh, and to have various work to do among the
clouds and waves, out of his human way; or sometimes, even, in a
sort of service to himself. Was not the nourishment of herbs and
flowers a kind of ministering to his wants? were not the gods in
some sort his husbandmen, and spirit-servants? Their mere strength
or omnipresence did not seem to him a distinction absolutely
terrific. It might be the nature of one being to be in two places at
once, and of another to be only in one; but that did not seem of
itself to infer any absolute lordliness of one nature above the
other, any more than an insect must be a nobler creature than a man,
because it can see on four sides of its head, and the man only in
front. They could kill him or torture him, it was true; but even
that not unjustly, or not for ever. There was a fate, and a Divine
Justice, greater than they; so that if they did wrong, and he right,
he might fight it out with them, and have the better of them at
last. In a general way, they were wiser, stronger, and better than
he; and to ask counsel of them, to obey them, to sacrifice to them,
to thank them for all good, this was well; but to be utterly
downcast before them, or not to tell them his mind in plain Greek if
they seemed to him to be conducting themselves in an ungodly
manner,--this would not be well.
Sec. 13. Such being their general idea of the gods, we can now easily
understand the habitual tone of their feelings towards what was
beautiful in nature. With us, observe, the idea of the Divinity is
apt to get separated from the life of nature; and imagining our God
upon a cloudy throne, far above the earth, and not in the flowers or
waters, we approach those visible things with a theory that they are
dead, governed by physical laws, and so forth. But coming to them,
we find the theory fail; that they are not dead; that, say what we
choose about them, the instinctive sense of their being alive is too
strong for us; and in scorn of all physical law, the wilful fountain
sings, and the kindly flowers rejoice. And then, puzzled, and yet
happy; pleased, and yet ashamed of being so; accepting sympathy
from nature, which we do not believe it gives, and giving sympathy
to nature, which we do not believe it receives,--mixing, besides,
all manner of purposeful play and conceit with these involuntary
fellowships,--we fall necessarily into the curious web of hesitating
sentiment, pathetic fallacy, and wandering fancy, which form a great
part of our modern view of nature. But the Greek never removed his
god out of nature at all; never attempted for a moment to contradict
his instinctive sense that God was everywhere. "The tree _is_ glad,"
said he, "I know it is; I can cut it down; no matter, there was a
nymph in it. The water _does_ sing," said he; "I can dry it up; but
no matter, there was a naiad in it." But in thus clearly defining
his belief, observe, he threw it entirely into a human form, and
gave his faith to nothing but the image of his own humanity. What
sympathy and fellowship he had, were always for the spirit _in_ the
stream, not for the stream; always for the dryad _in_ the wood, not
for the wood. Content with this human sympathy, he approached the
actual waves and woody fibres with no sympathy at all. The spirit
that ruled them, he received as a plain fact. Them, also, ruled and
material, he received as plain facts; they, without their spirit,
were dead enough. A rose was good for scent, and a stream for sound
and coolness; for the rest, one was no more than leaves, the other
no more than water; he could not make anything else of them; and the
divine power, which was involved in their existence, having been all
distilled away by him into an independent Flora or Thetis, the poor
leaves or waves were left, in mere cold corporealness, to make the
most of their being discernibly red and soft, clear and wet, and
unacknowledged in any other power whatsoever.
Sec. 14. Then, observe farther, the Greeks lived in the midst of the
most beautiful nature, and were as familiar with blue sea, clear
air, and sweet outlines of mountain, as we are with brick walls,
black smoke, and level fields. This perfect familiarity rendered all
such scenes of natural beauty unexciting, if not indifferent, to
them, by lulling and overwearying the imagination as far as it was
concerned with such things; but there was another kind of beauty
which they found it required effort to obtain, and which, when
thoroughly obtained, seemed more glorious than any of this wild
loveliness--the beauty of the human countenance and form. This, they
perceived, could only be reached by continual exercise of virtue;
and it was in Heaven's sight, and theirs, all the more beautiful
because it needed this self-denial to obtain it. So they set
themselves to reach this, and having gained it, gave it their
principal thoughts, and set it off with beautiful dress as best they
might. But making this their object, they were obliged to pass their
lives in simple exercise and disciplined employments. Living
wholesomely, giving themselves no fever fits, either by fasting or
over-eating, constantly in the open air, and full of animal spirit
and physical power, they became incapable of every morbid condition
of mental emotion. Unhappy love, disappointed ambition, spiritual
despondency, or any other disturbing sensation, had little power
over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of the blood; and what
bitterness might yet fasten on them was soon boxed or raced out of a
boy, and spun or woven out of a girl, or danced out of both. They
had indeed their sorrows, true and deep, but still, more like
children's sorrows than ours, whether bursting into open cry of
pain, or hid with shuddering under the veil, still passing over the
soul as clouds do over heaven, not sullying it, not mingling with
it;--darkening it perhaps long or utterly, but still not becoming
one with it, and for the most part passing away in dashing rain of
tears, and leaving the man unchanged; in nowise affecting, as our
sorrow does, the whole tone of his thought and imagination
thenceforward.
How far our melancholy may be deeper and wider than theirs, in its
roots and view, and therefore nobler, we shall consider presently;
but at all events, they had the advantage of us in being entirety
free from all those dim and feverish sensations which result from
unhealthy state of the body. I believe that a large amount of the
dreamy and sentimental sadness, tendency to reverie, and general
patheticalness of modern life results merely from derangement of
stomach; holding to the Greek life the same relation that the
feverish night of an adult does to a child's sleep.
Sec. 15. Farther. The human beauty, which, whether in its bodily being
or in imagined divinity, had become, for the reasons we have seen,
the principal object of culture and sympathy to these Greeks, was,
in its perfection, eminently orderly, symmetrical, and tender.
Hence, contemplating it constantly in this state, they could not but
feel a proportionate fear of all that was disorderly, unbalanced,
and rugged. Having trained their stoutest soldiers into a strength
so delicate and lovely, that their white flesh, with their blood
upon it, should look like ivory stained with purple;[61] and having
always around them, in the motion and majesty of this beauty, enough
for the full employment of their imagination, they shrank with dread
or hatred from all the ruggedness of lower nature,--from the
wrinkled forest bark, 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.
Sec. 16. Thus, 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. This ideal is very
interestingly marked, as intended for a perfect one, in the fifth
book of the Odyssey; when Mercury himself stops for a moment, though
on a message, to look at a landscape "which even an immortal might
be gladdened to behold." This landscape consists of a cave covered
with a running vine, all blooming into grapes, and surrounded by a
grove of alder, poplar, and sweet-smelling cypress. Four fountains
of white (foaming) water, springing _in succession_ (mark the
orderliness), and close to one another, flow away in different
directions, through a meadow full of violets and parsley (parsley,
to mark its moisture, being elsewhere called "marsh-nourished," and
associated with the lotus);[62] the air is perfumed not only by
these violets and by the sweet cypress, but by Calypso's fire of
finely chopped cedar wood, which sends a smoke as of incense,
through the island; Calypso herself is singing; and finally, upon
the trees are resting, or roosting, owls, hawks, and "long-tongued
sea-crows." Whether these last are considered as a part of the
ideal landscape, as marine singing-birds, I know not; but the
approval of Mercury appears to be elicited chiefly by the fountains
and violet meadow.
Sec. 17. Now the notable things in this description are, first, the
evident subservience of the whole landscape to human comfort, to the
foot, the taste, or the smell; and, secondly, that throughout the
passage there is not a single figurative word expressive of the
things being in any wise other than plain grass, fruit or flower. I
have used the term "spring" of the fountains, because, without
doubt, Homer means that they sprang forth brightly, having their
source at the foot of the rocks (as copious fountains nearly always
have); but Homer does not say "spring," he says simply flow, and
uses only one word for "growing softly," or "richly," of the tall
trees, the vine, and the violets. There is, however, some expression
of sympathy with the sea-birds; he speaks of them in precisely the
same terms, as in other places of naval nations, saying they "have
care of the works of the sea."
Sec. 18. If we glance through the references to pleasant landscape which
occur in other parts of the Odyssey, we shall always be struck by this
quiet subjection of their every feature to human service, and by the
excessive similarity in the scenes. Perhaps the spot intended, after
this, to be most perfect, may be the garden of Alcinous, where the
principal ideas are, still more definitely, order, symmetry, and
fruitfulness; the beds being duly ranged between rows of vines, which,
as well as the pear, apple, and fig-trees, bear fruit continually,
some grapes being yet sour, while others are getting black; there are
plenty of "_orderly_ square beds of herbs," chiefly leeks, and two
fountains, one running through the garden, and one under the pavement
of the palace to a reservoir for the citizens. Ulysses, pausing to
contemplate this scene, is described nearly in the same terms as
Mercury pausing to contemplate the wilder meadow; and it is
interesting to observe, that, in spite of all Homer's love of
symmetry, the god's admiration is excited by the free fountains, wild
violets, and wandering vine; but the mortal's, by the vines in rows,
the leeks in beds, and the fountains in pipes.
Ulysses has, however, one touching reason for loving vines in rows.
His father had given him fifty rows for himself, when he was a boy,
with corn between them (just as it now grows in Italy). Proving his
identity afterwards to his father, whom he finds at work in his
garden, "with thick gloves on, to keep his hands from the thorns,"
he reminds him of these fifty rows of vines, and of the "thirteen
pear-trees and ten apple-trees" which he had given him; and Laertes
faints upon his neck.
Sec. 19. If Ulysses had not been so much of a gardener, it might have
been received as a sign of considerable feeling for landscape
beauty, that, intending to pay the very highest possible compliment
to the Princess Nausicaa (and having indeed, the moment before,
gravely asked her whether she was a goddess or not), he says that he
feels, at seeing her, exactly as he did when he saw the young
palm-tree growing at Apollo's shrine at Delos. But I think the taste
for trim hedges and upright trunks has its usual influence over him
here also, and that he merely means to tell the princess that she is
delightfully tall and straight.
Sec. 20. The princess is, however, pleased by his address, and tells
him to wait outside the town, till she can speak to her father about
him. The spot to which she directs him is another ideal piece of
landscape, composed of a "beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a
fountain, and a meadow," near the road-side; in fact, as nearly as
possible such a scene as meets the eye of the traveller every
instant on the much-despised lines of road through lowland France;
for instance, on the railway between Arras and Amiens;--scenes, to
my mind, quite exquisite in the various grouping and grace of their
innumerable poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over
their level meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the
princess means aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her
fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning, and in perpetual
motion, compared to the "leaves of the tall poplar;" and it is with
exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards[63] the chief tree in
the groves of Proserpine; its light and quivering leafage having
exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, and
inconstancy which the ancients attributed to the disembodied
spirit.[64] The likeness to the poplars by the streams of Amiens is
more marked still in the Iliad, where the young Simois, struck by
Ajax, falls to the earth "like an aspen that has grown in an
irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots springing from its
top, which some coach-making man has cut down with his keen iron,
that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it lies
parching by the side of the stream." It is sufficiently notable that
Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells thus
delightedly on all the _flat_ bits; and so I think invariably the
inhabitants of mountain countries do, but the inhabitants of the
plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.
The Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields
and pollards: Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes
his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and willows,
a distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about it, a windmill, and
a ditch. The Flemish sacred painters are the only ones who introduce
mountains in the distance, as we shall see presently; but rather in
a formal way than with any appearance of enjoyment. So Shakspere
never speaks of mountains with the slightest joy, but only of
lowland flowers, flat fields, and Warwickshire streams. And if we
talk to the mountaineer, he will usually characterize his own
country to us as a "pays affreux," or in some equivalent, perhaps
even more violent, German term: but the lowland peasant does not
think his country frightful; he either will have no ideas beyond it,
or about it; or will think it a very perfect country, and be apt to
regard any deviation from its general principle of flatness with
extreme disfavor; as the Lincolnshire farmer in Alton Locke: "I'll
shaw 'ee some'at like a field o' beans, I wool--none o' this here
darned ups and downs o' hills, to shake a body's victuals out of his
inwards--all so vlat as a barn door, for vorty mile on end--there's
the country to live in!"
I do not say whether this be altogether right (though certainly not
wholly wrong), but it seems to me that there must be in the simple
freshness and fruitfulness of level land, in its pale upright
trees, and gentle lapse of silent streams, enough for the
satisfaction of the human mind in general; and I so far agree with
Homer, that if I had to educate an artist to the full perception of
the meaning of the word "gracefulness" in landscape, I should send
him neither to Italy nor to Greece, but simply to those poplar
groves between Arras and Amiens.
Sec. 21. But to return more definitely to our Homeric landscape. When
it is perfect, we have, as in the above instances, the foliage and
meadows together; when imperfect, it is always either the foliage or
the meadow; preeminently the meadow, or arable field. Thus, meadows
of asphodel are prepared for the happier dead; and even Orion, a
hunter among the mountains in his lifetime, pursues the ghosts of
beasts in these asphodel meadows after death.[65] So the sirens sing
in a meadow; and throughout the Odyssey there is a general tendency
to the depreciation of poor Ithaca, because it is rocky, and only
fit for goats, and has "no meadows;" for which reason Telemachus
refuses Atrides's present of horses, congratulating the Spartan king
at the same time on ruling over a plain which has "plenty of lotus
in it, and rushes," with corn and barley. Note this constant
dwelling on the marsh plants, or, at least, those which grow in flat
and well-irrigated land, or beside streams: when Scamander, for
instance, is restrained by Vulcan, Homer says, very sorrowfully,
that "all his lotus, and reeds, and rushes were burnt;" and thus
Ulysses, after being shipwrecked and nearly drowned, and beaten
about the sea for many days and nights, on raft and mast, at last
getting ashore at the mouth of a large river, casts himself down
first upon its _rushes_, and then, in thankfulness, kisses the
"corn-giving land," as most opposed, in his heart, to the fruitless
and devouring sea.[66]
Sec. 22. In this same passage, also, we find some peculiar expressions of
the delight which the Greeks had in trees, for, when Ulysses first
comes in sight of land, which gladdens him, "as the reviving of a
father from his sickness gladdens his children," it is not merely the
sight of the land itself which gives him such pleasure, but of the
"land and _wood_." Homer never throws away any words, at least in such
a place as this; and what in another poet would have been merely the
filling up of the deficient line with an otherwise useless word, is in
him the expression of the general Greek sense, that land of any kind
was in nowise grateful or acceptable till there was _wood_ upon it (or
corn; but the corn, in the flats, could not be seen so far as the
black masses of forest on the hill sides), and that, as in being rushy
and corn-giving, the low land, so in being woody, the high land, was
most grateful to the mind of the man who for days and nights had been
wearied on the engulphing sea. And this general idea of wood and corn,
as the types of the fatness of the whole earth, is beautifully marked
in another place of the Odyssey,[67] where the sailors in a desert
island, having no flour or corn to offer as a meat offering with their
sacrifices, take the leaves of the trees, and scatter them over the
burnt offering instead.
Sec. 23. But still, every expression of the pleasure which Ulysses has in
this landing and resting, contains uninterruptedly the reference to
the utility and sensible pleasantness of all things, not to their
beauty. After his first grateful kiss given to the corn-growing land,
he considers immediately how he is to pass the night: for some minutes
hesitating whether it will be best to expose himself to the misty
chill from the river, or run the risk of wild beasts in the wood. He
decides for the wood, and finds in it a bower formed by a sweet and a
wild olive tree, interlacing their branches, or--perhaps more
accurately translating Homer's intensely graphic expression--"changing
their branches with each other" (it is very curious how often, in an
entanglement of wood, one supposes the branches to belong to the wrong
trees), and forming a roof penetrated by neither rain, sun, nor wind.
Under this bower Ulysses collects the "_vain_ (or _frustrate_)
outpouring of the dead leaves"--another exquisite expression, used
elsewhere of useless grief or shedding of tears;--and, having got
enough together, makes his bed of them, and goes to sleep, having
covered himself up with them, "as embers are covered up with ashes."
Nothing can possibly be more intensely possessive of the _facts_
than this whole passage; the sense of utter deadness and emptiness,
and frustrate fall in the leaves; of dormant life in the human
body,--the fire, and heroism, and strength of it, lulled under the
dead brown heap, as embers under ashes, and the knitting of
interchanged and close strength of living boughs above. But there is
not the smallest apparent sense of there being _beauty_ elsewhere
than in the human being. The wreathed wood is admired simply as
being a perfect roof for it; the fallen leaves only as being a
perfect bed for it; and there is literally no more excitement of
emotion in Homer, as he describes them, nor does he expect us to be
more excited or touched by hearing about them, than if he had been
telling us how the chamber-maid at the Bull aired the four-poster,
and put on two extra blankets.
Sec. 24. Now, exactly this same contemplation of subservience to human
use makes the Greek take some pleasure in _rocks_, when they assume
one particular form, but one only--that of a _cave_. They are
evidently quite frightful things to him under any other condition,
and most of all if they are rough and jagged; but if smooth, looking
"sculptured," like the sides of a ship, and forming a cave or
shelter for him, he begins to think them endurable. Hence,
associating the ideas of rich and sheltering wood, sea, becalmed and
made useful as a port by projecting promontories of rock, and
smoothed caves or grottoes in the rocks themselves, we get the
pleasantest idea which the Greek could form of a landscape, next to
a marsh with poplars in it; not, indeed, if possible, ever to be
without these last: thus, in commending the Cyclops' country as one
possessed of every perfection, Homer first says: "They have soft
_marshy_ meadows near the sea, and good, rich, crumbling,
ploughing-land, giving fine deep crops, and vines always giving
fruit;" then, "a port so quiet, that they have no need of cables in
it; and at the head of the port, a beautiful clear spring just
_under a cave_, and _aspen poplars all round it_."[68]
Sec. 25. This, it will be seen, is very nearly Homer's usual "ideal;"
but, going into the middle of the island, Ulysses comes on a rougher
and less agreeable bit, though still fulfilling certain required
conditions of endurableness; a "cave shaded with laurels," which,
having no poplars about it, is, however, meant to be somewhat
frightful, and only fit to be inhabited by a Cyclops. So in the
country of the Laestrygons, Homer, preparing his reader gradually for
something very disagreeable, represents the rocks as bare and
"exposed to the sun;" only with some smooth and slippery roads over
them, by which the trucks bring down wood from the higher hills. Any
one familiar with Swiss slopes of hills must remember how often he
has descended, sometimes faster than was altogether intentional, by
these same slippery woodman's track roads.
And thus, in general, whenever the landscape is intended to be
lovely, it verges towards the ploughed land and poplars; or, at
worst, to _woody_ rocks; but, if intended to be painful, the rocks
are bare and "sharp." This last epithet, constantly used by Homer
for mountains, does not altogether correspond, in Greek, to the
English term, nor is it intended merely to characterize the sharp
mountain summits; for it never would be applied simply to the edge
or point of a sword, but signifies rather "harsh," "bitter," or
"painful," being applied habitually to fate, death, and in Od. ii.
333. to a halter; and, as expressive of general objectionableness
and unpleasantness, to all high, dangerous, or peaked mountains, as
the Maleian promontory (a much dreaded one), the crest of Parnassus,
the Tereian mountain, and a grim or untoward, though, by keeping off
the force of the sea, protective, rock at the mouth of the Jardanus;
as well as habitually to inaccessible or impregnable fortresses
built on heights.
Sec. 26. In all this I cannot too strongly mark the utter absence of
any trace of the feeling for what we call the picturesque, and the
constant dwelling of the writer's mind on what was available,
pleasant, or useful; his ideas respecting all landscape being not
uncharacteristically summed, finally, by Pallas herself; when,
meeting Ulysses, who after his long wandering does not recognize his
own country, and meaning to describe it as politely and soothingly
as possible, she says:[69]--"This Ithaca of ours is, indeed, a rough
country enough, and not good for driving in; but, still, things
might be worse: it has plenty of corn, and good wine, and _always
rain_, and soft nourishing dew; and it has good feeding for goats
and oxen, and all manner of wood, and springs fit to drink at all
the year round."
We shall see presently how the blundering, pseudo-picturesque,
pseudo-classical minds of Claude and the Renaissance landscape
painters, wholly missing Homer's practical common sense, and equally
incapable of feeling the quiet natural grace and sweetness of his
asphodel meadows, tender aspen poplars, or running vines,--fastened
on his _ports_ and _caves_, as the only available features of his
scenery; and appointed the type of "classical landscape"
thenceforward to consist in a bay of insipid sea, and a rock with a
hole through it.[70]
Sec. 27. It may indeed be thought that I am assuming too hastily that
this was the general view of the Greeks respecting landscape, because
it was Homer's. But I believe the true mind of a nation, at any
period, is always best ascertainable by examining that of its greatest
men; and that simpler and truer results will be attainable for us by
simply comparing Homer, Dante, and Walter Scott, than by attempting
(what my limits must have rendered absurdly inadequate, and in which,
also, both my time and knowledge must have failed me) an analysis of
the landscape in the range of contemporary literature. All that I can
do, is to state the general impression which has been made upon me by
my desultory reading, and to mark accurately the grounds for this
impression, in the works of the greatest men. Now it is quite true
that in others of the Greeks, especially in AEschylus and Aristophanes,
there is infinitely more of modern feeling, of pathetic fallacy, love
of picturesque or beautiful form, and other such elements, than there
is in Homer; but then these appear to me just the parts of them which
were not Greek, the elements of their minds by which (as one division
of the human race always must be with subsequent ones) they are
connected with the mediaevals and moderns. And without doubt, in his
influence over future mankind, Homer is eminently the Greek of Greeks;
if I were to associate any one with him it would be Herodotus, and I
believe all I have said of the Homeric landscape will be found equally
true of the Herodotean, as assuredly it will be of the Platonic; the
contempt, which Plato sometimes expresses by the mouth of Socrates,
for the country in general, except so far as it is shady, and has
cicadas and running streams to make pleasant noises in it, being
almost ludicrous. But Homer is the great type, and the more notable
one because of his influence on Virgil, and, through him, on Dante,
and all the after ages: and in like manner, if we can get the abstract
of mediaeval landscape out of Dante, it will serve us as well as if we
had read all the songs of the troubadours, and help us to the farther
changes in derivative temper, down to all modern time.
Sec. 28. I think, therefore, the reader may safely accept the
conclusions about Greek landscape which I have got for him out of
Homer; and in these he will certainly perceive something very
different from the usual imaginations we form of Greek feelings. We
think of the Greeks as poetical, ideal, imaginative, in the way that
a modern poet or novelist is; supposing that their thoughts about
their mythology and world were as visionary and artificial as ours
are: but I think the passages I have quoted show that it was not so,
although it may be difficult for us to apprehend the strange
minglings in them of the elements of faith, which, in our days, have
been blended with other parts of human nature in a totally different
guise. Perhaps the Greek mind may be best imagined by taking, as its
groundwork, that of a good, conscientious, but illiterate, Scotch
Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back, having perfect
faith in the bodily appearances of Satan and his imps; and in all
kelpies, brownies, and fairies. Substitute for the indignant terrors
in this man's mind, a general persuasion of the _Divinity_, more or
less beneficent, yet faultful, of all these beings; that is to say,
take away his belief in the demoniacal malignity of the fallen
spiritual world, and lower, in the same degree, his conceptions of
the angelical, retaining for him the same firm faith in both; keep
his ideas about flowers and beautiful scenery much as they
are,--his delight in regular ploughed land and meadows, and a neat
garden (only with rows of gooseberry bushes instead of vines,)
being, in all probability, about accurately representative of the
feelings of Ulysses; then, let the military spirit that is in him,
glowing against the Border forager, or the foe of old Flodden and
Chevy-Chase, be made more principal, with a higher sense of
nobleness in soldiership, not as a careless excitement, but a
knightly duty; and increased by high cultivation of every personal
quality, not of mere shaggy strength, but graceful strength, aided
by a softer climate, and educated in all proper harmony of sight and
sound: finally, instead of an informed Christian, suppose him to
have only the patriarchal Jewish knowledge of the Deity, and even
this obscured by tradition, but still thoroughly solemn and
faithful, requiring his continual service as a priest of burnt
sacrifice and meat offering; and I think we shall get a pretty close
approximation to the vital being of a true old Greek; some slight
difference still existing in a feeling which the Scotch farmer would
have of a pleasantness in blue hills and running streams, wholly
wanting in the Greek mind; and perhaps also some difference of views
on the subjects of truth and honesty. But the main points, the easy,
athletic, strongly logical and argumentative, yet fanciful and
credulous, characters of mind, would be very similar in both; and
the most serious change in the substance of the stuff among the
modifications above suggested as necessary to turn the Scot into the
Greek, is that effect of softer climate and surrounding luxury,
inducing the practice of various forms of polished art,--the more
polished, because the practical and realistic tendency of the
Hellenic mind (if my interpretation of it be right) would quite
prevent it from taking pleasure in any irregularities of form, or
imitations of the weeds and wildnesses of that mountain nature with
which it thought itself born to contend. In its utmost refinement of
work, it sought eminently for orderliness; carried the principle of
the leeks in squares, and fountains in pipes, perfectly out in its
streets and temples; formalized whatever decoration it put into its
minor architectural mouldings, and reserved its whole heart and
power to represent the action of living men, or gods, though not
unconscious meanwhile, of
"The simple, the sincere delight;
The habitual scene of hill and dale
The rural herds, the vernal gale;
The tangled vetches' purple bloom;
The fragrance of the bean's perfume,--
Theirs, theirs alone, who cultivate the soil,
And drink the cup of thirst, and eat the bread of toil."
[59] Compare Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto i. stanza 15., and
canto v. stanza 2. In the first instance, the river-spirit is
accurately the Homeric god, only Homer would have believed in
it,--Scott did not; at least not altogether.
[60] Compare the exquisite lines of Longfellow on the sunset in
the Golden Legend:--
"The day is done, and slowly from the scene
The stooping sun upgathers his spent shafts,
And puts them back into his golden quiver."
[61] Iliad iv. 141.
[62] Iliad ii. 776.
[63] Odyssey, x. 510.
[64] Compare the passage in Dante referred to above, Chap. XII. Sec. 6.
[65] Odyssey, xi. 571. xxiv. 13. The couch of Ceres, with Homer's
usual faithfulness, is made of a _ploughed_ field, v. 127.
[66] Odyssey, v. 398.
[67] Odyssey, xii. 357.
[68] Odyssey, ix. 132. &c. Hence Milton's
"From haunted spring, and dale,
Edged with poplar pale."
[69] Odyssey, xiii. 236. &c.
[70] Educated, as we shall see hereafter, first in this school,
Turner gave the hackneyed composition a strange power and
freshness, in his Glaucus and Scylla.