Part 2 (1/2)
elements in Homer, of which their adversaries were not slow to take advantage.
One of the most orthodox of all the formalists, who for some reason came to be very much quoted in England, Bossu, in his discourse on the Epic Poem, had serious difficulties with the adventures of Ulysses, and his stories told in Phaeacia. The episodes of Circe, of the Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are _machines_; they are also not quite easy to understand. ”They are necessary to the action, and yet they are not humanly probable.” But see how Homer gets over the difficulty and brings back these _machines_ to the region of human probability.
”Homere les fait adroitement rentrer dans la Vraisemblance humaine par la simplicite de ceux devant qui il fait faire ses recits fabuleux. Il dit a.s.sez plaisamment que les Pheaques habitoient dans une Isle eloignee des lieux ou demeurent les hommes qui ont de l'esprit.
[Greek: heisen d' en Scherie hekas andron alphestaon]. Ulysses les avoit connus avant que de se faire connoitre a eux: et aiant observe qu'ils avoient toutes les qualites de ces faineans qui n'admirent rien avec plus de plaisir que les aventures Romanesques: il les satisfait par ces recits accommodez a leur humeur. Mais le Poete n'y a pas...o...b..ie les Lecteurs raisonnables. Il leur a donne en ces Fables tout le plaisir que l'on peut tirer des veritez Morales, si agreablement deguisees sous ces miraculeuses allegories. C'est ainsi qu'il a reduit ces Machines dans la verite et dans la Vraisemblance Poetique.”[7]
[Footnote 7: _Traite du Poeme epique_, par le R.P. Le Bossu, Chanoine Regulier de Sainte Genevieve; MDCLXXV (t. ii. p. 166).]
Although the world has fallen away from the severity of this critic, there is still a meaning at the bottom of his theory of machines. He has at any rate called attention to one of the most interesting parts of Epic, and has found the right word for the episodes of the Phaeacian story of Odysseus. Romance is the word for them, and Romance is at the same time one of the const.i.tuent parts and one of the enemies of epic poetry. That it was dangerous was seen by the academical critics. They provided against it, generally, by treating it with contempt and proscribing it, as was done by those French critics who were offended by Ariosto and perplexed by much of the Gothic machinery of Ta.s.so. They did not readily admit that epic poetry is as complex as the plays of Shakespeare, and as incongruous as these in its composition, if the different const.i.tuents be taken out separately in the laboratory and then compared.
Romance by itself is a kind of literature that does not allow the full exercise of dramatic imagination; a limited and abstract form, as compared with the fulness and variety of Epic; though episodes of romance, and romantic moods and digressions, may have their place, along with all other human things, in the epic scheme.
The difference between the greater and the lesser kinds of narrative literature is vital and essential, whatever names may be a.s.signed to them. In the one kind, of which Aristotle knew no other examples than the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the personages are made individual through their dramatic conduct and their speeches in varying circ.u.mstances; in the other kind, in place of the moods and sentiments of a mult.i.tude of different people entering into the story and working it out, there is the sentiment of the author in his own person; there is one voice, the voice of the story-teller, and his theory of the characters is made to do duty for the characters themselves. There may be every poetic grace, except that of dramatic variety; and wherever, in narrative, the independence of the characters is merged in the sequence of adventures, or in the beauty of the landscape, or in the effusion of poetic sentiment, the narrative falls below the highest order, though the art be the art of Ovid or of Spenser.
The romance of Odysseus is indeed ”brought into conformity with poetic verisimilitude,” but in a different way from that of Bossu _On the Epic Poem_. It is not because the Phaeacians are romantic in their tastes, but because it belongs to Odysseus, that the Phaeacian night's entertainment has its place in the _Odyssey_. The _Odyssey_ is the story of his home-coming, his recovery of his own. The great action of the drama of Odysseus is in his dealings with Penelope, Eumaeus, Telemachus, the suitors. The Phaeacian story is indeed episodic; the interest of those adventures is different from that of the meeting with Penelope. Nevertheless it is all kept in harmony with the stronger part of the poem. It is not pure fantasy and ”Faerie,” like the voyage of Maelduin or the vigil in the castle of Busirane.
Odysseus in the house of Alcinous is not different from Odysseus of the return to Ithaca. The story is not pure romance, it is a dramatic monologue; and the character of the speaker has more part than the wonders of the story in the silence that falls on the listeners when the story comes to an end.
In all early literature it is hard to keep the story within limits, to observe the proportion of the _Odyssey_ between strong drama and romance. The history of the early heroic literature of the Teutonic tongues, and of the epics of old France, comes to an end in the victory of various romantic schools, and of various restricted and one-sided forms of narrative. From within and without, from the resources of native mythology and superst.i.tion and from the fascination of Welsh and Arabian stories, there came the temptation to forget the study of character, and to part with an inheritance of tragic fables, for the sake of vanities, wonders, and splendours among which character and the tragic motives lost their pre-eminent interest and their old authority over poets and audience.
III
ROMANTIC MYTHOLOGY
Between the dramatic qualities of epic poetry and the myths and fancies of popular tradition there must inevitably be a conflict and a discrepancy. The greatest scenes of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ have little to do with myth. Where the characters are most vividly realised there is no room for the lighter kinds of fable; the epic ”machines”
are superfluous. Where all the character of Achilles is displayed in the interview with Priam, all his generosity, all his pa.s.sion and unreason, the imagination refuses to be led away by anything else from looking on and listening. The presence of Hermes, Priam's guide, is forgotten. Olympus cannot stand against the spell of words like those of Priam and Achilles; it vanishes like a parched scroll. In the great scene in the other poem where the disguised Odysseus talks with Penelope, but will not make himself known to her for fear of spoiling his plot, there is just as little opportunity for any intervention of the Olympians. ”Odysseus pitied his wife as she wept, but his eyes were firm as horn or steel, unwavering in his eyelids, and with art he concealed his tears.[8]”
[Footnote 8:
[Greek: autar' Odysseus thymoi men gooosan heen eleaire gynaika, ophthalmoi d' hos ei kera hestasan ee sideros atremas en blepharoisi; doloi d' ho ge dakrya keuthen.]
_Od._ xix. 209.]
In pa.s.sages like these the epic poet gets clear away from the c.u.mbrous inheritance of traditional fancies and stories. In other places he is inevitably less strong and self-sustained; he has to speak of the G.o.ds of the nation, or to work into his large composition some popular and improbable histories. The result in Homer is something like the result in Shakespeare, when he has a more than usually childish or old-fas.h.i.+oned fable to work upon. A story like that of the _Three Caskets_ or the _Pound of Flesh_ is perfectly consistent with itself in its original popular form. It is inconsistent with the form of elaborate drama, and with the lives of people who have souls of their own, like Portia or Shylock. Hence in the drama which uses the popular story as its ground-plan, the story is never entirely reduced into conformity with the spirit of the chief characters. The caskets and the pound of flesh, in despite of all the author's pains with them, are imperfectly harmonised; the primitive and barbarous imagination in them retains an inconvenient power of a.s.serting its discordance with the princ.i.p.al parts of the drama. Their unreason is of no great consequence, yet it is something; it is not quite kept out of sight.
The epic poet, at an earlier stage of literature than Shakespeare, is even more exposed to this difficulty. Shakespeare was free to take his plots where he chose, and took these old wives' tales at his own risk.
The epic poet has matter of this sort forced upon him. In his treatment of it, it will be found that ingenuity does not fail him, and that the transition from the unreasonable or old-fas.h.i.+oned part of his work to the modern and dramatic part is cunningly worked out. ”He gets over the unreason by the grace and skill of his handling,”[9]
says Aristotle of a critical point in the ”machinery” of the _Odyssey_, where Odysseus is carried ash.o.r.e on Ithaca in his sleep.
There is a continual play in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ between the wonders of mythology and the spirit of the drama. In this, as in other things, the Homeric poems observe the mean: the extremes may be found in the heroic literature of other nations; the extreme of marvellous fable in the old Irish heroic legends, for example; the extreme of plainness and ”soothfastness” in the old English lay of _Maldon_. In some medieval compositions, as in _Huon of Bordeaux_, the two extremes are brought together clumsily and without harmony. In other medieval works again it is possible to find something like the Homeric proportion--the drama of strong characters, taking up and transforming the fanciful products of an earlier world, the inventions of minds not deeply or especially interested in character.
[Footnote 9:
[Greek: nun de tois allois agathois aphanizei hedunon to atopon.]
ARISTOT. _Poet._ 1460 b.]
The defining and shaping of myths in epic poetry is a process that cannot go on in a wholly simple and unreflecting society. On the contrary, this process means that the earlier stages of religious legend have been succeeded by a time of criticism and selection. It is hard on the old stories of the G.o.ds when men come to appreciate the characters of Achilles and Odysseus. The old stories are not all of equal value and authority; they cannot all be made to fit in with the human story; they have to be tested, and some have to be rejected as inconvenient. The character of the G.o.ds is modified under the influence of the chief actors in the drama. Agamemnon, Diomede, Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles set the standard by which the G.o.ds are judged. The Homeric view of the G.o.ds is already more than half-way to the view of a modern poet. The G.o.ds lose their old tyranny and their right to the steam of sacrifice as they gain their new poetical empire, from which they need not fear to be banished; not, at any rate, for any theological reasons.
In Shakespearean drama, where each man is himself, with his own character and his own fortune to make, there is small scope for any obvious Divine interposition in the scene. The story of human actions and characters, the more fully it is developed, leaves the less opportunity for the G.o.ds to interfere in it. Something of this sort was felt by certain medieval historians; they found it necessary to begin with an apologetic preface explaining the long-suffering of G.o.d, who has given freedom to the will of man to do good or evil. It was felt to be on the verge of impiety to think of men as left to themselves and doing what they pleased. Those who listen to a story might be tempted to think of the people in it as self-sufficient and independent powers, trespa.s.sing on the domain of Providence. A pious exculpation was required to clear the author of blame.[10]