conquered the world by force of arms, but itself was humanized and then
humanized the world through Greece. Every modern language today feels
the force of Isocrates and Demosthenes through Cicero, and of Alcæus
and Sappho through Horace, and of Greek tragedy through Seneca and of
Homer through Virgil. When later the barbarians of the north severed
Rome from Greece and the Roman Empire and its civilization lay dead, who
brought the world to life again? “When the accurate knowledge of Latin
was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland.”[2] It
was the Irish monks who freshened into flame the blackening embers of
European civilization and began its restoration. The revival was brought
about through the schools of Bobbio and St. Gall, mostly indeed as the
scattered books of their libraries show, by means of Latin literature but
always with the help of Greek, as the same libraries testify. That was
an earlier renaissance in Italy and Switzerland. And who was the leading
figure in the revival in Spain about the same time? It was the Greek
scholars, Isidore of Seville and, a little earlier, Hosius of Cordova,
and, a little later, John of Gerona. Then France began to grope out of
barbarism under the leadership of Charlemagne, resuming close relations
with Greece and importing the Irish monks, Clement and Dungal, and the
English monk, Alcuin. But it was under Charlemagne’s successor, Charles
the Bald, that this new renaissance took on a fresh energy which did not
spend itself before the decline of scholasticism. John Scotus, John
the Irishman, who styled himself in his translation of Dionysius from
the Greek by the title of Erin-born, for a quarter of a century kept
France intellectually alive, and did it chiefly by his Greek. John, the
Erin-born, was the forerunner of scholastic philosophy, which caught
the vital force of Greek through another channel also. When Spain was
conquered by barbarians and lost its civilization, where did its Arabian
conquerors go for the seeds of the new life? The Arabs went to Greece,
gave Aristotle in translation to Europe, and ushered in the golden age
of medieval philosophy. Rightly does Traini (1345), on an altar-piece in
Pisa, picture St. Thomas Aquinas receiving the light of knowledge from
Christ through the Greek New Testament and from Aristotle on his right
and from Plato on his left. As Aquinas combined patristic and scholastic
theology, he merged in his works the twofold Greek influences of Plato
and Aristotle, who were the human aids in each of these theologies.
Pass over several centuries to the time when the Italian renaissance
had grown senile and when scholarship left Spain, Italy and, to a large
extent, France, and found its home in the north. These nations lost
touch with Greek and their scholarship died down, while life moved
northward in the wake of Greek. When F. A. Wolf went to Halle about the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he represented the reaction against
the realism of that day, and “his conflict with the school of useful
knowledge brought into clear relief his ideal of a culture founded on
Greek traditions.”[3] Time has shown that Wolf’s theories of Homeric
authorship are all wrong, but the stimulus he gave to scholarship lasted
all through the nineteenth century, and to no other single influence more
than to Wolf may Germany ascribe its undoubted supremacy in classical
learning during the last century. His inspiration came from the Greek,
and in his vitalizing of Germany he was associated with others who had
felt the same inspiration and were already beginning the influence that
still in a measure persists: Heyne in the classics, Lessing in criticism
and Winckelmann in art.
England’s partial reawakening under Queen Anne saw Bentley, the Greek
scholar, and his contemporary, Pope, translator of the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_, and let scholars say what they will about Pope’s translation,
they cannot impugn the fine criticism of his introductions or the
lasting influence for good of his versions. Passing over the prime of
English eloquence, whose living roots, as Goodrich has shown, are in
Greek literature, we come to the fresh memories of our own time and to
the Victorian era. Again it is Greek which vitalizes every branch of
literature, philosophy and art with new and unexpected truth and life.
Without Greek the Victorian revival would not have come about. In poetry
recall Keats, who awoke to life through the reflected glory of Homer;
recall Cowper, translator of Homer, and Byron, who died for Greece,
and Moore, who translated Anacreon, and Landor and Arnold and Tennyson
and Browning, all of whom took substance and form and fire from Greek
sources. In essay-writing you have Brougham, eloquent advocate of Greek
oratory; De Quincey, who could, as his tutor said, at the age of thirteen
harangue a Greek crowd; Macaulay, who, even in manhood, weeps over his
Homer on the streets of London. In art there are Ruskin and Morris and
Pater, who are saturated with Greek thought. Think of statesmanship and
you will recall Lord Derby and Gladstone, political rivals, at one in
their love of Homer; think of criticism, and Lang, Saintsbury, Blackie,
Butcher and Jebb will say that through Greek they have dominated modern
criticism; think of history, and the names of Rawlinson and Grote and
Hallam, Grecians, will come forward in your mind. History! Why, you will
remember that all ancient history has recently been rewritten with the
spade, and it was Schliemann under the spell of Homer who turned the
first sod.
Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology
and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government,
and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences
founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within
a century, whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of
research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles
and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece
with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and
every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up
Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with
fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor
is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew
for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the
language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that
tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been
Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new
blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos,
the world, and of the microcosm, man.
XV
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM
The story of Phidias and his pupil, Alcamenes has often been told. They
competed for a prize in sculpture. The statue of Alcamenes was about
to be chosen because of its exquisite finish when Phidias objected
to any decision until the statues should be put in the high position
they were designed to occupy. At once, the opinions of the judges were
reversed, for the apparently rough lines of Phidias’s creation stood out
in sublime majesty, while the polish of Alcamenes’s was lost when the
statues were raised aloft. The story illustrates a splendid rule of art
which has often been forgotten in the study of Homer. The epics of Homer
were not made for the test-tube and the microscope. They were not made
even for readers; they were composed for listeners. Put them on their
proper pedestals and the minutiæ revealed by the grammarian’s microscope
will be lost in the grand sweep of the story. You would as soon halt
Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ because of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo
da Vinci’s “Last Supper” because of modern masonry in the walls or
carpentry in the table, as apply the philological and archeological tests
of the higher critics to Homer.
Apply the tests of art to Homer and judge him by those. Take the matter
of the contradictions which critics have talked so much about. In many
cases, especially where mythology was concerned, the material the poet
had to handle bristled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Long ago
Aristotle laid down the sensible rule for drama, and it is equally true
for epic poetry, that the poet is not responsible for the improbabilities
in his materials. The sculptor may have flaws in his block of marble; the
painter may have defects in his lead or oil, or pigments; and the epic
poet found contradictions in the fairy stories of mankind which he wove
into the story he sang. That one consideration will sweep away instantly
heaps of higher criticism.
Again, the artist is more taken up with the end than he is with
the means. In the fervor of his composition he wreaks himself upon
expression, he burns to embody his ideal and, engrossed in that, he is
likely to be less observant of the material of his art. The achieving of
the effect is more to him than mathematical accuracy in the use of the
instruments by which he achieves the effect. He makes his hero win his
battle; he may unhappily forget some of the tactics or even the geography
of the battlefield. His object is not to teach the art of warfare or
furnish the topography of the country, but to tell an interesting story
in an interesting way. The _Iliad_ has a wall that vexes many critics.
It was built in the tenth year of the war, which was no time to build a
wall, and was put up simply because Achilles left the field. Besides,
according to these critics the wall appears and disappears strangely.
So the conclusion is: Homer did not build the wall, but some other poet
came along and projected his masonry into the epic. In answer it has been
shown that the wall behaves very well, but, whether it does or not, it
matters little. The poet is not a surveyor or a street commissioner. He
wished to make his story interesting, to make the character of Achilles
prominent, to bring some agreeable variety into what might prove a
monotonous catalog of similar battles. Those are reasons enough for a
poet to build a Chinese wall or reduce it to dust when he does not want
it, or conveniently overlook it in the heat of an imaginary charge.
A story-teller is more concerned to please his hearers than to guard
against inconsistencies which they would never detect as listeners, and
which even close readers did not detect for about thirty centuries. A
work of art is not to be judged as a mass of machinery is, nor is a poem
to be scrutinized with dictionary and grammar as you would a schoolboy’s
exercise. This is the statue of Phidias over again. A stage scene will
differ somewhat from a miniature, and an epic takes liberties with walls
and rivers and even mountains and oceans, liberties which would not be
tolerated in a quatrain. These principles are as obvious as daylight, but
apostles of the obvious are needed in abundance in the harvest fields of
higher criticism.
What is needed for Homer is a study of his art in a broad but not shallow
way, comprehensive and fundamental like Aristotle’s brief discussion.
For the wonderfully analytical mind of Aristotle Homer’s _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ were models of unity, because he looked upon them as works of
art, not scrap-heaps of philology and archeology. Put the poems of Homer
on the pedestals for which he made them, for listeners who had to be
entertained and clamored for variety. “It is a trait of Homer,” says a
writer, “constantly to shift the scene. The motive may be weak, but the
eye of the poet was not on the motive, but on the scene; so he not only
shifts the scene but varies the description of the events.” The poet’s
eye, it might be added, is also like the orator’s, fixed steadily on his
audience, and the audience must be relieved even if masonry or geography
suffer.
The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern
every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the _Iliad_,
the battles. Homer’s audience wanted fighting, yet jaded listeners
and the artistic poet knew there must be in the fighting variety and
growth of interest. Even in the matter of killing men, which seems to us
unimportant but which would not be to an audience of fighters, Homer has
shown a wonderful variety. A German professor has diagnosed the Homeric
surgery with all the thoroughness of his class. The conclusions may be
found in Seymour’s _Life in the Homeric Age_. The number and variety of
the wounds, the weapons used, the percentages of fatalities, are all
given in full detail. “Hardly could the poet have covered more completely
the possibilities of wounds for the human body if he had proceeded
systematically and mechanically.” Some will have it that Homer was a
surgeon and an army doctor. Certainly the history of anatomy has its
first chapter in the _Iliad_.
But to pass over the variety displayed in the wounds and other smaller
points, consider the actual fighting. For the maneuvers we may refer to
two interesting chapters in Lang’s _World of Homer_, where the variety
and consistency of Homeric warfare are well described and defended
against the dissectionists. The point, however, we are working toward
is the variety shown in even the external circumstances of the warfare.
A closer study than we can afford to give would reveal more variety,
but we may mention the plain, the wall, the river, the night as in the
tenth book, the mist. These are the various circumstances which the poet
introduces into his battles, relieving the monotony and sustaining the
interest. There is no falling off. The different heroes, too, succeed one
another; the victory alternates from one side to the other; the battle
on earth has its echo among the gods. The interest rises. Patroclos
enters the fight, and then his fallen body becomes the center of the
struggle, as the wall and the ships had been before. Something, too, is
left for Achilles. Ferocious as may have been the fighting before, it
becomes a veritable shambles when Achilles enters the fray. Never were
such frightful wounds, never such rivers of blood as may be witnessed in
Book XX “when the black earth ran blood,” “when beneath the great-hearted
Achilles his whole-hooved horses trampled corpses and shields together;
and with blood all the axle-tree below was sprinkled and the rims that
ran around the car, for blood-drops from the horses’ hooves splashed
them and blood-drops from the tires of the wheels. But the son of Peleus
pressed on to win his glory, flecking with gore his irresistible hands.”
Then follows the battle in the river, and finally the battle of the gods
themselves, and after the necessary relief and lull and reawakening of
interest comes the last battle of all and the climax of the poem in the
conflict of Achilles and Hector.
A study of the art of Homer along its great lines will give us the true
principles upon which to judge him. Such a study will put him in the
right perspective. The statue of Phidias will mount on high where its
artist wished to have it enshrined. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were meant
to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was
a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high roofed hall of a
great-hearted King. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that
from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round then was a frieze of
blue and within were seats arrayed against the wall this way and that.”
Then “after the men had put from them the desire of meat and drink,”
they called upon the minstrel. “For minstrels from all men on earth get
their meed of honor and worship; inasmuch as the muse teacheth them the
paths of song and loveth the tribe of minstrels.” “And the minstrel being
stirred by the god began and showed forth his minstrelsy and took up the
tale where it tells how the Argives sailed away.” That was the setting of
the Homeric Epic, and thus speaks one whose “heart had melted at the song
and whose tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids.” “Verily it is a good
thing to list to a minstrel, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I
say there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people
makes merry, and the men sit orderly at feasts in the halls and listen
to the singer and the tables by them are laden with bread and flesh, and
pours it into cups. This fashion seems to me the fairest thing in the
world.”
There is the place that Homer chose for his matchless poems, and there
they should be judged. The hearts that melt with song are not searching
for digammas or Æolic forms. They want the story, the long voyages and
the strange adventures, the swaying lines of battle and the prowess of
heroes. They look for and recognize the different characters which must
be as varied and as clearly marked as in the life around them. They must
not be surfeited with too much of anything. Voyages and battles must vary
and grow in intensity and be crossed with pictures of nature, brief but
thrilling and immensely relieving,—the lion, the wheat field, the tossing
ocean and the steady downfall of an unending snow storm. With these and
the plot entangling and disentangling, the listeners to Homeric song and
story will not look for that polished smoothness and frigid exactness,
the absence of which vexes the minds of modern Germany. Phidias’ statue
occupies its proper pedestal, and the true judges award to Phidias his
well-deserved prize.
XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE
Their elders are too busy these days devising tests for the children. Is
it not time for the children to retort on their testers? “Having pried
and prodded into us to see if we measure up to you, dear elders, let us
now see,” the children may well say, “whether you measure up to us.” A
great philosopher wished to make man the measure of everything. We have
a truer, a divine philosophy, a philosophy all the more persuasive, and
that philosophy makes the child the measure and test of man’s worth
and the arbiter of his eternal destiny. “Whosoever shall not receive
the kingdom of God, as a child, shall not enter it.” The millstone
mooring the scandalizer in the ooze of ocean’s darkest depths and the
angels who see the face of their little one’s Father, these are the
extreme sanctions which guarantee the accuracy of the child-test for the
measurement of man.
The child-test has often been applied to man’s morals. Onan and Sanger,
Sparta and China, Calvin’s unchristian infant damnation and the
Christless infant sanctification of Pelagius, Malthus with his “Decrease
and subtract” and Moses with his “Increase and multiply,” all, from
individuals to nations, are ample evidence that the child is set for the
ruin and resurrection of many in Israel. The child-test is surely potent
in rating the world’s moral morons and moral geniuses.
Can the child-test be applied to man’s art and literature? Recall the
words of Job, “Who shut up the sea with doors, when I made a cloud the
garment thereof and wrapt it in a mist in swaddling bands?” That view of
the sea in the swaddling bands of infancy is a proof of an imagination
looking at the universe with the eyes of the Creator. The child-test
is a measure of the sublimity of Hebrew literature. The revelation of
Genesis gave the literature of the Bible an outlook never reached by
other literatures. As the promise of the Messiah kept a hallowing guard
over the cradles of Israel, so the vision of the Creator blotted out from
the concepts of the Hebrew imagination the crude and monstrous nativities
which make all pagan mythologies hybrid and miscegenetic.
Homer has fewer than others have of these nightmares, but it is not in
them nor in the tinsel sublimity of his divine machinery that Homer has
touched a wider circle of readers than any of his epic brethren. Rather
it is in his unaffected and transparent portrayal of the human nature
we all understand that Homer has set the heart of the world throbbing
faster. Not the celibate Virgil, nor the Puritanic Milton, dissolver
of matrimony, nor yet Dante, idealizer of the maiden Beatrice, gave us
childhood and motherhood as Homer has done. Homer is no sentimentalist,
but he has wider sympathies with mother and child than any author on the
rolls of literature. The mother cow, lowing over its first-born; the
mother dog, growling in defense of its litter; the mother lion, all its
brow wrinkled with the greatest frown ever sketched; the mother bird,
starving and dying for its young, yes, even the mother wasp, solicitous
for its menaced brood (note that, S. P. C. A.!) these are evidences of
Homer’s tenderness. Achilles likens his friend Patroclus to a little
maid fondly catching at her mother’s dress and getting in her way with
persistent tearful pleading till the mother takes her up. In the _Iliad_,
Helen’s sorrow for her abandoned Hermione is a pleasing element in her
repentance. Odysseus proudly styles himself the father of Telemachus;
the mother of Odysseus dies for longing of him, and his father, Laertes,
in the most exquisite of the many recognition scenes of the _Odyssey_,
passes from view in that story, while his long-absent son tells him of
the fruit trees, “which,” says Odysseus, “thou once gavest me for mine
own, and I was begging of thee this and that, being but a child and
following thee through the garden.” We have natural sketches of the
babyhood of his two heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.
Yet, more than all these pictures, stands out in the world’s imagination
Hector’s boy, whose future fate Andromache, after Hector’s death,
details with a mother’s despairing vividness, whose childish terror at
his father’s helmet, while Andromache smiles through her tears, has
brought home to unnumbered thousands the grim specter of war. That scene
has etched itself so deeply into the heart of mankind that it has almost
ruined Homer’s poem, alienating universal sympathy from Achilles to
Hector.
After Homer, the child _motif_ in literature is less in evidence.
Drama, of its nature, has little place for the child except to put a
keener poignancy in tragedy. So Sophocles used the children of Œdipus.
So in his time did Shakespeare with the princes of _Richard III_, with
Marcellus in _Coriolanus_, with Macduff’s sprightly lad, and with others.
Theocritus has a child to furnish an aside for the gossipy Syracusan
dames. Anacreon introduces the counterfeit of childhood in the Cupids,
whose sophisticated conventionality checked invention in Elizabethan
lyrics as it did in art from Pompeii to Rubens and later. Cupids are
symbols, children of the brain, not of the heart, and figure in song and
painting as signs. They have a message for the mind; they do not touch
the feelings, while on the other hand, they free the artist from seeking
in life the expressive significance that Homer gave the child.
Literature had to wait long for the naturalness of Homer to reappear.
Virgil has a little of it in Ascanius, another Cupid, and it is
significant that Virgil’s one outstanding natural touch is found in
the famous Messianic eclogue: _Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere
matrem._ As for other Latins, whether it be bachelorship or the erotic
preoccupation of the lyricists, or the supreme power of the father
in Roman customs and law, Latin literature does not mirror for us
prominently the child and mother nor reflect their natural attractiveness
as found in Homer. Well, even Greece seems to have lost the art, and a
new inspiration was needed. That inspiration came with the Divine Child
of Bethlehem.
XVII
THE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE
The influence of the Christ-Child on painting was tremendous and
lasting. A history of Christian art could be written around the Madonna,
and the subject has attracted the notice of many writers, indexed in
art libraries. Alice Meynell has treated the subject attractively and
with her studious insight in the _Children of the Old Masters_. In the
Catacombs, Christian art felt and portrayed the Divine Child and His
Mother. Byzantine ornamentation and mosaics gave the Child a rigid
majesty which veiled His winsomeness, but the master painters came
closer to childhood and brought Madonnas from the walls of crypts and of
cathedrals to the devotional shrine and the chapel, making the Child less
architectural and more natural.