And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face;
which is the true poetical magic and something yet more attractive.
Arnold immediately proceeds from this to a passage in which the Celtic writer describes the dropping of blood as faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest. Well, Homer says, Gladness fell upon his spirit like dew upon the ears of ripening corn when there is a rustling in the fields. The Celtic passage is the more exquisite, at any rate than Homer in my prose. But between these two passages who would say that there is an essential difference? It is not maintained that Homer writes in this manner as often as a Romantic poet; and that is a difference worth remarking. But I do assert that he can write so when he likes, and as well as any.
Now what if this finer poetic magic is really a subtilization of the crude appeal of practical magic? Something like this Arnold almost suggests. What if Homer’s and Keats’s magic entrances us in part because somewhere in us sleeps a memory of miracles wrought in days when every rock and tree and river was alive with supernatural force? There is nothing fantastic in such a speculation. If we entertain it, we may find it illuminating the whole field of this discussion. At once we recall the almost incredibly vast and almost wildly “Romantic” mythology of Greece, the material and the inspiration of Greek poetry as it was the material and inspiration of Keats. Now the genuine mythology of Hellas first gathered shape in an age which believed in obvious magic, in the transformation of men and women into birds and beasts and trees and flowers, and in the living holiness of natural objects. Its origin is not explicable on any other hypothesis. We have therefore to consider how it happened that Greek poetry, born (we must believe) in an atmosphere as redolent of magic as this mythology implies, came to divest itself of vulgar magic and “Celtic vagueness,” till it came to appear to a critic like Arnold devoid also of the touch which he thinks exclusively characteristic of Romance.
It happened, no doubt, as part of that whole reaction to Barbarism which we call Hellenism. For magic is barbaric. The peoples all about Hellas believed in it of course, and had magicians practising it. In Greece itself the belief in magic lingered throughout Greek history, lingered that is to say in secluded places and among the many unenlightened. We hear of Epôdoi, “Charmers”; of Goêtes, “Groaners”; of Baskanoi, who had the evil eye—three varieties of wizard. There are echoes of a popular credence in the magical to be heard even in Greek literature, that disdainful and fastidious thing. In Homer we read that the wound received by Odysseus from the boar of Parnassus was closed by repeating an incantation over it. There is a good deal of white magic in the Works and Days of Hesiod. Nearly half of Aeschylus’ Choêphoroi consists in an invocation or evocation of the ghost of dead Agamemnon. And so on. In later Hellenistic times there existed a great body of magical writings, born of the contact between Greek civilization and Oriental superstition. There must have been a public for this stuff. Professional miracle-workers were not uncommon, and some of them won a resounding popularity. The book of Pausanias, who wrote down what he heard and saw in the greater part of Greece at the beginning of the second Christian century is strongly and—to you and me—pleasantly redolent of immemorial customs and beliefs among the peasantry. Many of these are plainly magical in their nature or their origin. The priests of Lykaian Zeus, he tells us, used to bring rain by dipping a branch in a certain stream and shaking it, sprinkling waterdrops. That, of course, was sheer magic—“making rain” as an African medicineman would say. A custom of this sort, which has become a ritual, may be kept up after people have ceased quite to believe in the doctrine which it assumes as true. That, however, does not touch the historical significance of the custom, which must have arisen among people who believed in magic. Besides, the peasants in Pausanias’ day were clearly very superstitious. His book is the proof of that. To suppose that in this respect they differed widely from their ancestors is to suppose something which common sense cries out against, and what evidence there is refutes.
Hellenism, then, the flower of the Greek spirit, grew in a soil impregnated with superstition, or, if you do not care for that word, with a religion containing many elements of magic. Every modern student of the subject, I fancy, admits that, although some scholars make more of the magical elements, some less. What no one can deny is that Hellenism tends to reject magic, and tries to expel it from human life. Magic was barbaric, and Hellenism was in reaction against Barbarism. Very likely the reaction went too far; reactions usually do. Very likely something too much was sacrificed to “Greek sanity.” But it would be strange ingratitude on our part to forget that it was this very urgency for the sane, for the rational, which ensured that our civilization was founded on hard realistic thinking, and not on a mere drift of emotionality. The task of thinking things out to their end, even to their bitter end, which was so characteristic of the Greeks, peculiarly fitted them for their task of laying intellectual foundations. It is not an English characteristic, and for that reason we are the more indebted to them. But scarcely less unjust would it be to suppose that the Greeks sacrificed everything to the rational. Nothing of the sort. They felt the charm to which the Celtic imagination yielded itself so utterly. But out of magic could not be built, they thought, any helpful philosophy or sound method of art. So their literature, when it deals with this matter and deals with it at its best, consciously or instinctively aims at drawing from it its full value for the imagination without for a moment permitting it to subdue the judgment. Any one reading in turn Mr. Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters and that part of the Odyssey which deals with the adventures of Odysseus in magic-haunted lands will see what I mean. Yeats’s hero yields himself to the charm; Odysseus fights against it. Which is the wiser is a question I leave to you. But here we have, in an illustration that is almost an epigram, the difference between the Celtic or extreme Romantic temper and the Hellenic temper. The Celt hears the Sirens and follows them; the Greek hears them and unwillingly sails past.
Or you may say: the Celtic gift is vision, the Hellenic gift is light.
Observe Homer’s dealings with magic. He often finds himself in its presence, and he deals with it in various ways. He leaves it out, he veils it, he transforms it. I am unable to see on what real grounds we can follow one of the most eminent of English scholars in Homer in dividing off the rest of the Homeric poems from those books of the Odyssey which tell of Odysseus’ wanderings in unknown lands and seas. When does magic cease to be magic? Is it magic when Circe in the Odyssean fairyland changes men into swine, and not magic when Athena in Ithaca changes Odysseus into a beggar and herself into a bird? However, what Dr. Leaf has in mind is rather a difference which he feels in the whole atmosphere of these fairyland books, which the ancients knew by the title of the Narrative to Alkinoos, from the rest of the Odyssey and from the Iliad. The Narrative, he thinks, moves in places which it is hopeless to look for in the map. The geography of the rest is really to be found on the map, if you only know where to look for it. I might agree with this and yet hold (as I should) that the geographical point is deceptive. Odysseus does pass out of known into unknown lands, but he does not pass out of one atmosphere into another. There are more miracles and magic in the Narrative than in the rest of Homer, but the treatment of them is the same. Or, to put it somewhat differently, Phaeakia is just as real to me as Troy or Ithaca. And I fancy it was just as real to Homer.