XVTRUE 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’sMacbethbecause of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” becauseof 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. TheIliadhas 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 wouldnot 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’sIliadandOdysseywere 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 theIliad, 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 audienceof 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’sLife 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 theIliad.
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’sWorld 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; thebattle 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. TheIliadandOdysseywere meant to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was agleam 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 thestory, 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.