Still viewing her with tear-drowned eyes, when she has made her stoop.”[4]
Chapman’s “hangs on her” is hardly so particular as Homer’s εἱανοῦ ἀπτομένη, plucks at her gown; and he has quite missed the picture offered by the poet, who makes the child, as soon as she discovers her mother, beg to be taken up, and insistently stop her as she goes by on some errand. Here again the naïve domestic scene in Homer is charged in Chapman with a certain half-tragic meaning.
This, we think, completes the short catalogue of Homer’s indirect reference to childhood, and the comparison with the Elizabethan poet’s use of the same forms brings out more distinctly the sweet simplicity and native dignity of the Greek. When childhood is thus referred to by Homer, it is used with no condescension, and with no thought of investing it with any adventitious property. It is a part of nature, as the bees are a part of nature; and when Achilles likens his friend in his tears to a little girl wishing to be taken up by her mother, he is not taunting him with being a “cry-baby.”
Leaving the indirect references, one recalls immediately the single picture of childhood which stands among the heroic scenes of the Iliad. When Hector has his memorable parting with Andromache, as related in the sixth book of the Iliad, the child Astyanax is present in the nurse’s arms. Here Chapman is so careless that we desert him, and fall back on a simple rendering into prose of the passage relating to the child:—
“With this, famous Hector reached forth to take his boy, but back into the bosom of his fair-girded nurse the boy shrank with a cry, frightened at the sight of his dear father; for he was afraid of the brass,—yes, and of the plume made of a horse’s mane, when he saw it nodding dreadfully at the helmet’s peak. Then out laughed his dear father and his noble mother. Quick from his head famous Hector took the helmet and laid it on the ground, where it shone. Then he kissed his dear son and tossed him in the air, and thus he prayed to Zeus and all the gods.... These were his words, and so he placed the boy, his boy, in the hands of his dear wife; and she received him into her odorous bosom, smiling through her tears. Her husband had compassion on her when he saw it, and stroked her with his hand, spoke to her, and called her by her name.”[5]
Like so many other passages in Homer, this at once offers themes for sculpture. Flaxman was right when he presented his series of illustrations to the Iliad and Odyssey in outline, and gave a statuesque character to the groups, though his interpretation of this special scene is commonplace. There is an elemental property about the life exhibited in Homer which the firm boundaries of sculpture most fitly inclose. Thus childhood, in this passage, is characterized by an entirely simple emotion,—the sudden fear of an infant at the sight of his father’s shining helmet and frowning plume; while the relation of maturity to childhood is presented in the strong man’s concession to weakness, as he laughs and lays aside his helmet, and then catches and tosses the child.
It is somewhat perilous to comment upon Homer. The appeal in his poetry is so direct to universal feeling, and so free from the entanglements of a too refined sensibility, that the moment one begins to enlarge upon the sentiment in his epic one is in danger of importing into it subtleties which would have been incomprehensible to Homer. There is preserved, especially in the Iliad, the picture of a society which is physically developed, but intellectually unrefined. The men weep like children when they cannot have what they want, and the passions which stir life are those which lie nearest the physical forms of expression. When we come thus upon this picture of Hector’s parting with Andromache, we are impressed chiefly with the fact that it is human life in outline. Here are great facts of human experience, and they are so told that not one of them requires a word of explanation to make it intelligible to a child. The child, we are reminded in a later philosophy, is father of the man, and Astyanax is a miniature Hector; for we have only to go forward a few pages to find Hector, when brought face to face with Ajax, confessing to a terrible thumping of fear in his breast.
There is one figure in early Greek domestic life which has frequent recognition in literature. It helps in our study of this subject to find the nurse so conspicuous; in the passage last quoted she is given an epithet which is reserved for goddesses and noble women. The definite regard paid to one so identified with childhood is in accord with the open acceptance of the physical aspect of human nature which is at the basis of the Homeric poems. The frankness with which the elemental conditions of life are made to serve the poet’s purpose, so that eating and drinking, sleeping and fighting, weeping and laughing, running and dancing, are familiar incidents of the poem, finds a place for the nurse and the house-dog. Few incidents in the Odyssey are better remembered by its readers than the recognition of the travel-worn Odysseus by the old watch-dog, and by the nurse who washes the hero’s feet and discovers the scar of the wound made by the boar’s tusk when the man before her was a youth.
The child, in the Homeric conception, was a little human creature uninvested with any mystery, a part of that society which had itself scarcely passed beyond the bounds of childhood. As the horizon which limited early Greece was a narrow one, and the world in which the heroes moved was surrounded by a vast terra incognita, so human life, in its Homeric acceptance, was one of simple forms; that which lay beyond tangible and visible experience was rarely visited, and was peopled with shapes which brought a childish fright. There was, in a word, nothing in the development of man’s nature, as recorded by Homer, which would make him look with questioning toward his child. He regarded the world about him with scarcely more mature thought than did the infant whom he tossed in the air, and, until life should be apprehended in its more complex relations, he was not likely to see in his child anything more than an epitome of his own little round. The contrast between childhood and manhood was too faint to serve much of a purpose in art.
The difference between Homer and the tragedians is at once perceived to be the difference between a boy’s thought and a man’s thought. The colonial growth, the Persian war, the political development, the commerce with other peoples, were witnesses to a more complex life and the quick causes of a profounder apprehension of human existence. It happens that we have in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles an incident which offers a suggestive comparison with the simple picture of the parting of Hector and Andromache. In the earlier poem, the hero, expecting the fortunes of war, disdains all suggestions of prudence, and speaks as a brave man must, who sets honor above ease, and counts the cost of sacrifice only to stir himself to greater courage and resolution. He asks that his child may take his place in time, and he dries his wife’s tears with the simple words that no man can separate him from her, that fate alone can intervene; in Chapman’s nervous rendering:—