Art principles in literature

by Francis P. Donnelly

The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the Iliad, 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 audience of 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’s Life 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 the Iliad.

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’s World 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; the battle 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. The Iliad and Odyssey were meant to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was a gleam 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 the story, 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.

XVI
THE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE

Their elders are too busy these days devising tests for the children. Is it not time for the children to retort on their testers? “Having pried and prodded into us to see if we measure up to you, dear elders, let us now see,” the children may well say, “whether you measure up to us.” A great philosopher wished to make man the measure of everything. We have a truer, a divine philosophy, a philosophy all the more persuasive, and that philosophy makes the child the measure and test of man’s worth and the arbiter of his eternal destiny. “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God, as a child, shall not enter it.” The millstone mooring the scandalizer in the ooze of ocean’s darkest depths and the angels who see the face of their little one’s Father, these are the extreme sanctions which guarantee the accuracy of the child-test for the measurement of man.

The child-test has often been applied to man’s morals. Onan and Sanger, Sparta and China, Calvin’s unchristian infant damnation and the Christless infant sanctification of Pelagius, Malthus with his “Decrease and subtract” and Moses with his “Increase and multiply,” all, from individuals to nations, are ample evidence that the child is set for the ruin and resurrection of many in Israel. The child-test is surely potent in rating the world’s moral morons and moral geniuses.

Can the child-test be applied to man’s art and literature? Recall the words of Job, “Who shut up the sea with doors, when I made a cloud the garment thereof and wrapt it in a mist in swaddling bands?” That view of the sea in the swaddling bands of infancy is a proof of an imagination looking at the universe with the eyes of the Creator. The child-test is a measure of the sublimity of Hebrew literature. The revelation of Genesis gave the literature of the Bible an outlook never reached by other literatures. As the promise of the Messiah kept a hallowing guard over the cradles of Israel, so the vision of the Creator blotted out from the concepts of the Hebrew imagination the crude and monstrous nativities which make all pagan mythologies hybrid and miscegenetic.

Homer has fewer than others have of these nightmares, but it is not in them nor in the tinsel sublimity of his divine machinery that Homer has touched a wider circle of readers than any of his epic brethren. Rather it is in his unaffected and transparent portrayal of the human nature we all understand that Homer has set the heart of the world throbbing faster. Not the celibate Virgil, nor the Puritanic Milton, dissolver of matrimony, nor yet Dante, idealizer of the maiden Beatrice, gave us childhood and motherhood as Homer has done. Homer is no sentimentalist, but he has wider sympathies with mother and child than any author on the rolls of literature. The mother cow, lowing over its first-born; the mother dog, growling in defense of its litter; the mother lion, all its brow wrinkled with the greatest frown ever sketched; the mother bird, starving and dying for its young, yes, even the mother wasp, solicitous for its menaced brood (note that, S. P. C. A.!) these are evidences of Homer’s tenderness. Achilles likens his friend Patroclus to a little maid fondly catching at her mother’s dress and getting in her way with persistent tearful pleading till the mother takes her up. In the Iliad, Helen’s sorrow for her abandoned Hermione is a pleasing element in her repentance. Odysseus proudly styles himself the father of Telemachus; the mother of Odysseus dies for longing of him, and his father, Laertes, in the most exquisite of the many recognition scenes of the Odyssey, passes from view in that story, while his long-absent son tells him of the fruit trees, “which,” says Odysseus, “thou once gavest me for mine own, and I was begging of thee this and that, being but a child and following thee through the garden.” We have natural sketches of the babyhood of his two heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.