Part 9 (1/2)

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 Hoht that one whitthem with her open hand

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 thecheek, was at the sa o clouds, hich, filled with theand concealing theof the idea, provided that he does not pretend to make it an interpretation instead of a , beautiful beaten Diana, into a moon behind clouds[83]

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 aer of ourlike comprehension of the truth of divinity, instead of si the words in which the Deity reveals Hi hardly any effort to conceive divinefro its immediate presence, than that of the sied at his sword's breaking in his hand upon the helmet of Paris, after he had expressly invoked the assistance of Jupiter, exclai who had betrayed him, ”Jove, Father, there is not another God more evil-minded than thou!”[84] 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, io and take care of Paris herself”[85]

The arly and unjustly, shocked by this kind of fan ofof the hus, a healthy, and, in a certain degree, a perfect life He had noof any kind He was accustoo all kinds of bodily hardshi+p without coht and honourable, 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 thethus i which it seemed quite as difficult to master, as to rule the ele superiority in those Gods to have bodies of water, or fire, instead of flesh, and to have various work to do a the clouds and waves, out of his human way; or sometimes, even in a sort of service to himself Was not the nourish to his wants; were not the Gods in soth or omnipresence did not seeht 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 ht it out with theeneral way, they iser, stronger, and better than he; and to ask counsel of theood, this ell: but to be utterly downcast before them, or not to tell them histhemselves in an unGodly eneral idea of the Gods, we can now easily understand the habitual tone of their feelings towards as beautiful in nature With us, observe, the idea of the Divinity is apt to get separated fro 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 co to them, we find the theory fail; that they are not dead; that, say e choose about the 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 asha syiving sy, besides, all manner of purposeful play and conceit with these involuntary fellowshi+ps,--we fall necessarily into the curious web of hesitating sentireat 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 ,” said he; ”I can dry it up; but nohis belief, observe, he threw it entirely into a hue of his own humanity What sympathy and fellowshi+p 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 noelse of them; and the divine pohich 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, indiscernibly red and soft, clear and wet, and unacknowledged in any other pohatsoever

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 theination 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, seelorious 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 theave it their principal thoughts, and set it off with beautiful dress as best they ed to pass their lives in si wholeso 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 a sensation, had little power over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of the blood; and what bitterness ht 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,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, notor utterly, but still not beco away in dashi+ng rain of tears, and leaving the , as our sorrow does, the whole tone of his thought and iination 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 entirely free from all those dim and feverish sensations which result froe amount of the dreaeneral patheticalness of e to the Greek life the saht of an adult does to a child's sleep

Farther The huined 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, sy 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;[86] and having always around theh for the full eination, they shrank with dread or hatred froedness of lower nature,--froular, inorganic stor to these for thepleasure only in such portions of the loorld as were at once conducive to the rest and health of the huentler beauty

Thus, as far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is corove This ideal is very interestingly marked, as intended for a perfect one, in the fifth book of the _Odyssey_; when Mercury hie, to look at a landscape ”which even an iladdened to behold”[87]

This landscape consists of a cave covered with a running vine, all bloorove of alder, poplar, and sweet-s) water, springing _in succession_ (mark the orderliness), and close to one another, floay in different directions, through a meadow full of violets and parsley (parsley, toelsewhere called ”marsh-nourished,” and associated with the lotus[88]); 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 sh 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, asbirds, I know not; but the approval of Mercury appears to be elicited chiefly by the fountains and violet s in this description are, first, the evident subservience of the whole landscape to human comfort, to the foot, the taste, or the se 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 ter” of the fountains, because, without doubt, Ho their source at the foot of the rocks (as copious fountains nearly always have); but Ho,” he says si 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 sa they ”have care of the works of the sea”

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 arden of Alcinous, where the principal ideas are, still more definitely, order, syed between rows of vines, which, as well as the pear, apple, and fig trees, bear fruit continually, so 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 sa to conte 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 the his identity afterwards to his father, wholoves 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[90]

If Ulysses had not been so n of considerable feeling for landscape beauty, that, intending to pay the very highest possible co, indeed, the ravely 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 pal at Apollo's shrine at Delos[91] But I think the taste for triht trunks has its usual influence over him here also, and that he htfully tall and straight

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, corove of aspen poplars, a fountain, and a meadow,”[92] near the road-side: in fact, as nearly as possible such a scene as meets the eye of the traveller every instant on the h lowland France; for instance, on the railway between Arras and Arouping and grace of their innu sweet, tremulous shadows over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams We know that the princess means aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fiftyand in perpetual motion, compared to the ”leaves of the tall poplar”; and it is with exquisite feeling that it is roves of Proserpine; its light and quivering leafage having exactly the ility, faintness, and inconstancy which the ancients attributed to the disembodied spirit[94] The likeness to the poplars by the streams of A Simois, struck by Ajax, falls to the earth ”like an aspen that has grown in an irrigatedfro man has cut doith his keen iron, that heby the side of the strea in htedly 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 sihtedly on mountains The Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and pollards;[96] Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and s, 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 enjoyhtest joy, but only of lowland flowers, flat fields, and Warwickshi+re 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 terhtful; 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 froeneral principle of flatness with extreme disfavour; as the Lincolnshi+re 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's vloor, for vorty mile on end--there's the country to live in!”[97]

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 streaeneral; and I so far agree with Homer, that, if I had to educate an artist to the full perception of the racefulness” in landscape, I should send hiroves between Arras and Amiens

But to return more definitely to our Homeric landscape When it is perfect, we have, as in the above instances, the foliage and ether; when ie or the meadow; pre-eminently the meadow, or arable field Thus, meadows of asphodel are prepared for the happier dead; and even Orion, a hunter ahosts of beasts in these asphodelin a eneral tendency to the depreciation of poor Ithaca, because it is rocky, and only fit for goats, and has ”no meadows”;[100] for which reason Tele the Spartan king at the sa over a plain which has ”plenty of lotus in it, and rushes,” with corn and barley Note this constant dwelling on the row 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”;[101] and thus Ulysses, after being shi+pwrecked and nearly drowned, and beaten about the sea forashore at the e river, casts himself down first upon its _rushes_, and then, in thankfulness, kisses the ”corn-giving land,” assea[102]

In this sae, also, we find soht which the Greeks had in trees; for, when Ulysses first co of a father froladdens his children,” it is not ives him such pleasure, but of the ”land and _wood_” Homer never throay any words, at least in such a place as this; and what in another poet would have beenup of the deficient line with an otherwise useless word, is in hieneral Greek sense, that land of any kind was in no wise grateful or acceptable till there ood_ upon it (or corn; but the corn, in the flats, could not be seen so far as the blackrushy and corn-giving, the low land, so in being woody, the high land was hts 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_,[103] where the sailors in a desert island, having no flour of corn to offer as awith their sacrifices, take the leaves of the trees, and scatter the instead

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 iht; for so 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 for their branches, or--perhaps raphic expression--”changing their branches with each other” (it is very curious how often, in an entangle trees) and for 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,covered himself up with the 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 huth of it, lulled under the dead brown heap, as eed and close strength of living boughs above But there is not the s _beauty_ elsewhere than in the hu 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 beabout the us how the chambermaid at the Bull aired the four-poster, and put on two extra blankets

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 hih and jagged; but if s ”sculptured,”