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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.
If you profess to love me, you will not forget that.” But Democrates was passing almost beyond the limits of coherent speech. “Oh, when you come to me, you will not know what a price I have paid for you. In Homer’s day men wooed their wives with costly gifts, but I—have I not paid for you with my soul?
They are all, too, engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying Æneas, an even more pathetic imagination than Homer’s; others attempt to save their household goods; others erect a tent; others, again, attempt to scale the sides of the ark or break into it with axes—one cannot but hope they will succeed.
In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing more. If Homer’s Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not they, but Homer’s art, would suffer the injury.
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.
I might, otherwise, have become a mere philologist; one of those beings who toil night and day in culling useless words for some opus magnum which Murray will never publish, and nobody ever read; beings without enthusiasm, who, having never mounted a generous steed, cannot detect a good point in Pegasus himself; like a certain philologist, who, though acquainted with the exact value of every word in the Greek and Latin languages, could observe no particular beauty in one of the most glorious of Homer’s rhapsodies.
There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric qualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured for our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of naïf wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator?
Homer’s famed representation of Jupiter—his cried-up description of a tempest, his relation of Neptune’s shaking the earth and opening it to its centre, his description of Pallas’s horses, with numbers of other long-since admired passages, flag, and almost vanish away, in the vulgar Latin translation.
There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer’s description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself.
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