When we turn from the Hebrew to the Greek poetry, as represented by the father of it, Homer, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. It is not merely that in the regard which the great poet casts on Nature, mythology, a fading and only half-alive mythology, still lingered. It is not this only, but it is that in his thoughts of Nature there is not the same awful reverence, the same profound pathos; but there is more of the artistic sense of beauty, that artistic sense which is only fully developed when the profounder feelings are comparatively laid asleep.
No land known to the ancients, perhaps I might say no land ever known to men, has supplied such visual stimulus to the imagination as Greece;—scenery so richly diversified, a land beyond all others various in features and elements, mountains with their bases plunged into the sea, valleys intersected by great rivers, rich plains and meadows inlaid between the hill-ranges, deeply indented shores, promontories wood-clad or temple-crowned looking out on the many-islanded, Ægean;—around it, on every side, seas so beautiful, above it such a canopy of sky, changing through every hour and every season, and calling forth from sea and land every color which sunlight and gloom can elicit.
If of all nations the Greeks were endowed with the keenest sensibility to beauty, and if Homer was their chief and representative poet, it could hardly be but that scenery so varied should melt into his imagination and reflect itself in his poetry. And so it is. Homer lived most probably on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where he had ever before his eye the island-studded Ægean, behind him the rich valleys opening down to the coast, and eastward the great mountain ranges where these rivers are cradled; could it be that of all this his poetry should give no sign? I cannot agree with Mr. Ruskin’s criticism of the Homeric scenery. You will find it in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” chapter xiii., on Classical Landscape. Like everything which Mr. Ruskin writes, it is interesting and suggestive, but I cannot think it adequate or wholly true. Of the Greeks he says: “They shrank with dread or hatred from all the ruggedness of lower nature—from the wrinkled forest bark and the jagged hill-crest, and irregular inorganic storm of sky, looking to these for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest and health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its gentler beauty.” Again he says: “As far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove.” Again: “It is sufficiently notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the inhabitants of mountainous countries do; but the inhabitants of the plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.”
Now, in this passage, the general assertion seems to be much too sweeping, and, in the special instance of Homer, I think it is not true. Mr. Ruskin backs his position by reference to various passages in the Odyssey which seem to bear him out, but in any fair estimate we must take in the Iliad as well as the Odyssey.
In the Iliad the descriptions of Nature are not so detailed as in the Odyssey. Indeed, they occur almost entirely in similes; but these the poet fetches from every realm and feature of Nature—from the mountain, the forest, the sea, especially as seen darkening under the coming of the western breeze; from the cloudy and the midnight sky; from all kinds of wild animals, the lion, the fawn, the hawk, and the boar. In his battle-scenes it is to all the sterner and fiercer aspects of Nature, and habits of wild beasts, that he has recourse for his comparisons. And would he have so often invoked the aid of these wild forces and creatures of his imagination had not he delighted in them?
So when Teucer slays Mentor, it is thus, as rendered by Lord Derby:—
“Down he fell,
As by the woodman’s axe, on some high peak
Falls a proud ash, conspicuous from afar,
Leveling its tender leaves upon the ground.”