After all, there is really very little overt magic in the Narrative, even if we include the wonder-working of the goddess Circe and other divine beings, who might be said to perform miracles rather than practise witchcraft. Of this wonder-working observe how little is made: just as little as possible. The transformation and retransformation of Odysseus’ companions is told in a line or two. Think what the Kalevala or the Arabian Nights would have made of it. The whole necromantic business of the Descent to Hades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey is transacted in a few formal, ritualistic phrases. Originally all that matter must have been steeped in magic. It is the same with Homer’s treatment of the monstrous. The Homeric spirit objects to monsters; and so you never notice, unless you look closely at the text, what horrible creatures the Sirens were. Scylla and Charybdis are not fully described; much is left to the reader’s imagination. The Cyclops, it must be allowed, is different. Homer, you see, had to make him eat Odysseus’ men and had to put his eye out; the story would not tell otherwise. But somehow the passage is not so ghastly as one would expect. It is full of remorseless description—the Cyclops vomits “wine and bits of human flesh”—and yet despite such “realism” the poet contrives to enfold our spirits in an air of enchantment—the true poetical enchantment—in which all things are at once vivid and remote, like a dream freshly remembered.
Homer of course is a problem, about which it is very hard to say anything that pleases everybody. There are on the one side scholars who think that our Iliad and Odyssey are only the final versions of two traditional poems, which were handled by many poets through a long succession of years. On the other side are those who believe that the two poems are entirely, or substantially, the work of a single early poet, who rose so far above his predecessors as [(Note 161)]to owe little or nothing to them. This makes it difficult to argue a point in Homer with any general acceptance. But no student now seems to deny that Homer—whether we give the name to the one exceptional early poet or (tentatively) to the last of all those who worked on the poems—inherited something of his material. He did not invent the history of Troy, and he had to deal with it as he found it. Now all this traditional matter—for the matter is traditional whether the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves are traditional poems or not—must to all appearance have been saturated in the magical. That is the normal condition of the stuff in which poetry, so far as we can see, everywhere takes its rise. Besides, the mythology of Greece, which it is fair to call the stuff of Greek poetry, is full of magic. The inference is that Homer and the Greek poets in general till the end of the “Classical” period sought to work out of their matter all that savoured of the magical.
I think it was Andrew Lang who first pointed out that Homer clearly avoids telling stories which are “morally objectionable.” Still more certainly we discover that stories which are quite inoffensive in Homer are excessively “objectionable” in other writers. What is the meaning of this? Is it that later generations defiled the golden innocence of Homeric days in their baser imaginations, or that Homer knew the other, more savage and ancient-seeming versions, and would not recount them? For my part I think Homer knew! And I think he knew about the magic also. There are constant transformations, particularly in the Iliad, of gods into human and animal forms. Is that magic or is it not? Surely it is all of a piece with the “shape-shiftings” of wizards, so common in all mythologies; and these are admitted magic. But in the first place these transformations, as we remarked, are treated with a light and veiling hand, and secondly they are confined to the gods. What Homer allows to them he will not allow to mortals. He or his predecessors have erected the distinction between gods and men which forms one of the bases of Greek religion. Nay, you can trace in him, I believe, the beginnings of something more—a reluctance to speak even of the gods as performing these metamorphoses into brutish form. As a rule the Greeks did not mind such tales, or even clung to them from motives which can only be described as “Romantic.” But Homer perhaps softens them down a good deal, and scarcely deserves the censure of Plato, who denounces them who would make a wizard of God. The metamorphoses in Homer are singularly unobtrusive. But why are they there at all? The answer must surely be because they were in the story and could not be left out altogether.
Am I forgetting that Homer was a poet and not a moralist? I think not. I might, with a show of reason, reply that the early Greek poet was a moralist, his aim (as Aristophanes puts it) “to make men better in their cities.” But I prefer to say that Homer’s objection to the monstrous and the grossly magical is really an æsthetic one. Other considerations come in as well, but the æsthetic consideration is found to be in the long run predominant. I once pointed out that many of the similes in Homer turn out, on closer examination, to involve an actual metamorphosis. An actual transformation—say of Athena into a [(Note 163)]shooting-star—imperceptibly passes into a mere comparison. This is one device for reducing the magical element. But there are others. So spake she, says the poet of Helen, when she wondered why her brethren were not to be descried among the Greek host before Troy. So spake she, but them the life-breathing earth was now holding fast in Lacedaemon, there, in their own native land. φυσίζοος αἶα, “life-breathing earth,” as unhappy translators must say, derives half its poetical value as Ruskin saw (in this case at least justly enough) from the ancient belief, very strong in old Greece, that Earth was physically the mother of all life, the dear mother of gods and men. Again, who cannot see the passage before his eyes of physical into poetical magic in the lines where Zeus mourns the coming doom of his son Sarpedon? “When soul and life have left him, send Death and sweet Sleep to carry him until they come to the land of broad Lycia, where his brethren and his kin will make an abiding barrow and pillar for him; for thus we honour the dead.” So Hera spake, and the Father of Gods and men obeyed her counsel; and he let fall blood-drops on the ground, honouring his son, that Patroklos was fated to slay in fruitful Troyland far from his native land. What is Romantic poetry if this is not? And you see how it is produced? By a veiling of the crudely magical.
It is impossible to resist a little more quotation. Father, cries Telemachus to Odysseus, verily a great marvel is this that I behold with mine eyes. Truly, the walls of the chambers, and the fair bases of the pillars, and the roof-beams of fir, and the columns that hold all on high are shining to my sight as if from flaming fire. Doubtless some god is in the house! It [(Note 164)]is in just such a light that we see all the Homeric world. It is not the witch’s firelight, but it is the light in which the true poetical magic works. Unhappy, what curse hath come upon you? In darkness your heads are rolled, and your faces, and your knees beneath you; a moan is enkindled, and cheeks are wet, and blood is on the walls and fair pedestals; ghosts in the doorway, ghosts in the courtyard of them that hasten to the dark world below; the sun hath perished out of heaven, and an evil mist is over you! So cries in the Odyssey the man with second sight. Is it not all very “Celtic”?
In the ancient Hymn to Demeter Persephone is described as playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean and culling flowers—rose and crocus and violet over the soft meadow, and iris and hyacinth and narcissus, which, by the will of Zeus, Earth, favouring Him of the Many Guests, sent up to snare the flower-faced maiden a glittering marvel for all to see with wondering eyes, both gods immortal and mortal men:—from the one root an hundred heads of blossom; very sweet the fragrance of that flower, and the delight of it made laugh wide heaven above, and all the earth, and the salt and surging waters.
If this be not “natural magic,” where shall we find it? And is there not something exquisite in the sense or tact which tells the Greek when to stop before the magic becomes too crude or obvious? The Greek poet knows when to stop, the Romantic not always. Here, in another of the Hymns, the Hymn to Dionysus (VII), is the frank description of a miracle. But soon marvellous things were shown among them. First, over the swift black ship sweet, odorous wine was plashing, and a divine perfume arose; and amaze took hold of all the gazing mariners. Anon, along the topmost edge of the sail a vine laid out its tendrils here and there; thick hung the clusters; and round the mast dark ivy twined, deep in flowers and pleasant with berries, and all the thole-pins were garlanded. For sheer loveliness of fancy it would not be easy to beat that. And how great an effect is gained by temperance! A little more detail and the charm would be dissolved—the ship would be too like a Christmas tree. It is in such wise economies that Greek art is so great. It is just in them that the Romantic is apt to fail. Therein he bewrays his Barbarism.
I will no longer doubt that the reader (who probably did not require the demonstration) is convinced that Greek poetry occasionally attains those very effects of “natural magic” which Arnold denied it. What has happened is merely this: Greek poetry has carried farther than any other a process of refining out some elements in the crude material in which it began. That it may have lost in the process a certain amount of the purest gold I am not denying. I am not pleading the cause of Greek poetry, I am trying to understand it. It is thought by scholars that poetry has everywhere been developed out of a kind of song or chorus, which (to put it gently) is very often magical in character. One at last gets things like some of the Russian folk-songs or the Finnish lays which Lönnrot collected to form the Kalevala. It is a pity the Kalevala has not found an adequate English translator. One may honestly wish that Longfellow had translated it instead of giving us Hiawatha, which is a somewhat close imitation. One may delight in Hiawatha, but one can see in the baldest translation (as it were with half an eye) that Kalevala is fifty times better. If you want magic, and very delightful magic, go there! It seems to me, remembering, that all the chief characters in the Kalevala are sorcerers. In the very first lay you are lost in the forest of enchantment, and you never get out of it. The Kalevala is not the highest kind of poetry of course; it is (as Mrs. Barbauld complained of The Ancient Mariner) too “improbable” for that. But it pleases our taste because it is so desperately “Romantic.”—But you are not going to say that it is as good as the Odyssey?
The truth, of course, is that poetry like the Odyssey and the Iliad and the Agamemnon, just as much as The Divine Comedy and Hamlet, gets beyond these distinctions of Romantic and Classical. I daresay there is as much, in proportion, of this kind of poetry in Greek as even in our own literature. At any rate, there seems to be no doubt that the greatest poetry is not written except on Greek principles. There must be that “fundamental brain-work,” as Rossetti called it, which is the characteristic Greek contribution to art. You may put a less rigid interpretation upon the Hellenic maxims, you may apply them in ever so many new fields, but the essence of them you must keep. The Barbarian may be picturesque enough, but he is not an artist: he loses his head.
It would be enormously interesting to consider how a passage like this—