|
 HOMER
will always remain the greatest and most typical name not only
in ancient poetry, but in ancient art as a whole. Whatever conclusions
modern scholars have arrived at concerning the origin of the
Homeric poems, they would all agree in placing the name of Homer
where Comte has placed it; and the reasons of their choice would
be in substance the same as his:
(i) Homer is the greatest representative of primitive pre-literary
poetry.
(ii) The IliadI and the Odyssey are the types
of epic poetry; and contain, in detail, some of the noblest and
purest poetry in the world.
(iii) Homer is a most important sorce of knowledge as to the
life and thought of primitive Greece.
(iv) Homer is the principal factor in the intellectual development
of Greece, the type and model of Greek art and character.
(i) When we consider Homer as the representative of primitive
poetry, we must hold some theory as to the nature of the personality
hidden behind the poems which bear his name. Those poems, which
have been known to the world for more than two thousand years
as "Homer," may most probably be dated about
800 B.C. The literature and the poetry of that age were supplied
in the Greek world, surrounding the Ægean Sea, by a class
of wandering minstrels who sang or recited from place to place
the stories of bygone days. To which part of this Greek world
we owe the birth of the Homeric poems, we cannot say. Some of
the minstrels, no doubt, were poets of creative power: others
adapted or repeated their lays. One of the favourite legends
among the bards related to a great siege of the city of Troy,
or Ilium, in North-West Asia Minor, by a combined force of Greeks
from every tribe. The motive of the war was well fitted to commend
the story to the hospitable halls of the Greek chiefs: it was
revenge for the rape of a Greek chieftain's wife by a foreign
guest--Helen, the wife of Menelaus, by Paris of Troy. After many
adventures and prolonged delay the invaders took the city and
burnt it.
One incident in this story, which was sung in innumerable
lays, was seized on by an imagination stronger than the rest,
and was made the central thought and connecting link of a longer
lay. It told of the wrath of Achilles, the chief hero of the
Greeks, who, wronged by Agamemnon, another leader, withdrew for
some time from the fight: it described the sufferings of the
Greeks in the absence of the hero: and how at length he was induced,
by indignation and grief at the loss of a fallen friend, to return
to their help, and to stem the tide of defeat. This story was
the primitive Iliad, and forms the greater part of the
present poem. The unity of the motive and the greatness of the
poetry made the lay a favourite with the bards; but, as they
recited it, they were tempted by local interests and by ambition
to add fresh episodes celebrating other Greek chiefs besides
Achilles and other tribes. In these additions, however, they
maintained the spirit and the style of the greater bard, and
very likely in some cases adapted other short poems of his own.
We may thus speak of the Iliad as the work of Homer--if
Homer were the great bard's name--in much the same sense in which
we speak of the Parthenon marbles as the work of Phidias, though
we cannot suppose that they were all executed by his own hand.
The other great poem which we attribute to the same name embodies
another fragment of the legend of Troy. It relates to the adventures
of Odysseus--the hero of counsel among the Greeks at Troy, as
Achilles was the hero of the war--on his journey home from Troy
to Ithaca: it describes the troubles suffered in his absence
by his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, at the hands
of a crowd of greedy and importunate suitors; the fortitude and
constancy with which they resisted the attacks and the final
triumph of the hero on his return, who appears at last as great
in action as in counsel. That this poem the Odyssey, is
the fruit of the same genius which planned the Iliad there
is no evidence. The differences in general tone and in detail
are many and striking; and they led even a school of Greek critics
to attribute the two poems to different poets. If we are led
to the same conclusion, we need not marvel that the youthful
vigor of a poetic race, and the favouring conditions of an age
of minstrelsy, produced at least two poets of surpassing merit.
But we must note a similarity of language and subject sufficient
to show that the poet of the original Iliad exercised
a powerful influence over later as well as contemporary poets.
His unique greatness lies in this, that he combined the strong
human sympathy, the life-like action, and the picturesque language
of early poetry, in their most perfect form, with the conception
of a unity of structure and a progressive interest which belongs
naturally to a later literary age.
(ii) When we come to consider the Iliad and the Odyssey
as a poetic whole, and to estimate their importance in the evolution,
first, of the Greeks, and then of Humanity in the sum, the question
of the origin of the poems, and even of the personality of the
poet, becomes comparatively insignificant. Both the poems, and
especially the Iliad, were accepted from the first as
the type of epic, the highest order of poetry. It is from Homer
that Aristotle draws his canons of epic poetry. An epic poem
must constitute a united whole. This unity in the Iliad
is what we recognize as the trait of the great original poet--that
trait which impressed itself most on his contemporaries and reappears
even more strongly in the later Odyssey. An epic poem,
too, must develop a progressive interest. This interest we feel
in the course of that primitive Iliad, free from inconsistent
digressions, where reverses press harder and harder upon the
Greeks until the death of Patroclus touches Achilles' personal
feelings and brings him back to the Grecian host. And in the
final catastrophe of the Odyssey we feel that progressive
interest even more strongly developed as the recognition of the
hero and the overthrow of his enemies are slowly and steadily
prepared. The third mark of the epic which Aristotle demands--dignity
of language and manner--belongs to Homer in unapproachable degree,
and gives a peculiar charm and force to almost every line of
the two poems.
Besides these qualities, which belong to the Iliad
and Odyssey as a whole, the details in every part are
marked by certain unique and consistent features. We are presented
with a picture of every type of human character and every phase
of human life possible in an early military society. All these
are drawn not with a subtle psychological analysis, but in clear
characteristic strokes, marking out types true to all time. And,
though typical, none of Homer's characters are ideal, but purely
human. We have bravery typified in many forms--commanding in
Agamemnon; generous in Menelaus; high-spirited in Achilles. In
Nestor we have the counsellor, wise with years; in Odysseus,
the man of cunning word and scheme; Andromache is the tender
wife, fearful of her husband's danger; Hector, the loving husband--loving
honour more; Penelope, the matron and constant wife, faithful
against time and importunity; Achilles, the devoted friend, tortured
even at night by the loss of his companion. And in their subordinate
spheres are warriors, minstrels, children, slaves, clearly and
truly drawn to life.
Looking at the language of Homer, apart from the subject-matter,
we are struck most by its simplicity, the directness of the diction,
the movement of the verse. Nearly every illustration appeals
not to thought and memory, but to eye and ear, and is expressed
in language as vivid as the picture. And when the words describe
not action, but feelings, they are full of reality, and go straight
to the heart. "Wife!" says Hector, as he takes farewell,
"verily, all that is in my mind. But I should be shamed
indeed before the Trojans and their long-robed wives were I,
like a coward, to avoid the battle."
(iii) In using Homer as an authority for the thought and life
of primitive Greece, we must remember that he is a poet. The
main features of the society he describes will be drawn from
the facts around him; the details will be largely imaginative,
and in the region of pure imagination--the supernatural sphere
of Homer--the poet will make long advances beyond the habitual
thoughts of his hearers.
To the society of Homer the patriarch has become the priest
and king of his tribe--the leader in battle and in council--the
source and dispenser of justice. Such are the chiefs of the Iliad.
In time of peace the chieftan lives in his ancestral home, and
superintends his herds and lands. Such a position Odysseus holds
in Ithica, and Alcinous in Phæacia. Art and commerce in
Homer are almost entirely of foreign origin, due to Phoenician
merchants. Literature is unknown.
The morality of Homer is indicated by the types of characters
which are held up to admiration--the brave warrior, the clever
counsellor, the liberal host, the faithful friend, the constant
wife; and by those which are held up to reprobation--the coward,
the spiteful detractor, the greedy and arrogant man. No general
principles are appealed to; but the loyal observance of particular
ties, and especially those of a relative or a friend, is recognised
as a duty. Women--as heads of households--enjoy a high degree
of freedom and respect.
But it is in his theology that Homer most perfectly sums up
the thought of the age, which he puts into the shape which most
powerfully influenced the thought of posterity. We see the older
fetichistic deities--earth, sun, sea, night, superseded by the
later and perfectly human types--Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite,
and Poseidon--in which the Greeks figured the Deity. To these
deities, Homer gives the distinctive character and position and
function in the Pantheon which they retain throughout the Greek
system. The gods become men and women of stronger passions and
larger powers, but differing from men and women only in degree.
And although these supernatural beings take part in the action
of Homeric story, and interfere with the course of natural events,
their action and interference are so defined and limited, that
the story preserves its natural interest, and the men and women
gain rather than lose by the presence of the superhuman.
(iv) The supreme greatness of of the Homeric poems is learnt
in the history of the Greeks and in the analysis of Greek thought.
In the first place, Homer was the one common possession of all
the Greeks. Their actual life was broken up by innumerable feuds
and jealousies; in Homer, more than in any historical event--more
even than in Marathon and Salamis--they had a meeting-ground
in the record of a united and disinterested action. It is the
charter of Greek unity. It is, too, with Hesiod's poem, the Bible
of the Greeks. It was studied by every Greek--known by heart,
we are told, by many. The expositor of Greek theology appealed
to Homer. The sceptic attacked the belief of Homer as the representative
of the popular creed. The teacher of morality quoted his texts
from Homer; and those who, like Plato, wished to purify and elevate
the national morals, found in Homer the traditional standard
which they condemned. Homer is a key to the Greek view of life
and of the world. The human ideal of religion and morality which
we find in him dominates their whole conception. The gods are
greater men, perfect in those personal qualities which were prized
as virtues--strength, beauty, and wisdom. As the old men in Troy
adored the beauty of Helen in spite of the troubles she had brought
upon them, so the Greeks found in beauty of every kind the seal
of perfection, and connected ugliness with imperfection and vice,
as Homer united them in Thersites. The ideal of art, connected
intimately from the first with religion, is to make the perfect
human form as an honour and an offering to the gods. Not only
in its general aim and spirit, but in every department and every
detail of Greek art--and thence in Roman art--we find the influence
of Homer. In sculpture and painting, the types of the gods were
the types which Homer had created--the Zeus of Phidias was the
Zeus of Homer. In the drama, tragedians found their subjects
in the Homeric tale; the plays of Æschylus
were "morsels from the feast of Homer," while the spirit
of Greek tragedy breathes already in many Homeric scenes:--the
parting of hector, the house of Priam after Hector's death, the
ransoming of Hector's body. As the type of epic poetry, Homer
gives inspiration, subject, and many details to Virgil; and through
Virgil we trace the influence of Homer in the modern epic.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
