Lying was traditionally a Greek vice. The Greek lied as naturally as the Persian told the truth. Homer wishes to set forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic perfections. He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies." Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul. On the other hand, he was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as Shakespeare was. Now the position of women in historical Greece was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know, was very high indeed. This was a question to touch such a man to the quick; the position he gives women is very high: very much higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that had been made by that time in general culture. Andromache, in Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a Greek, but Egyptian idea.
Homer's contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his Works and Days of the plebeian and peasant life of his time. Hesiod had not the grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of the English Crabbe. It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives. Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from the background of his own day. Nor did Shakespeare, trying to paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London prentices, cobblers and the like. Learned Ben, on the other hand, contrives in his Sejanus and his Catiline, by dint and sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson; never a pterodactyl walks down his Piccadilly. But Shakespeare rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less Greek, he had to create his human beings—draw them from the life, and from the life he saw about him. The deeper you see into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter; you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the externals worry about themselves. Now Homer was a deal more like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference: he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his contemporaries. Men in those days, he says, were of huger stature than they are now. And yet, when his imagination is not actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero, real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes—to obtrude on him. So he lets in bits now and again that belong to the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of Hesiod's dismal picture.
Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his songs," as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just now, "in the ancient sacred hymns." As Shakespeare was first an actor, then a tinkerer of other men's plays, then a playwright on his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker of new ones. He saw the wretched condition of his people, contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination. His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as yoke-fellow with race-pride. You shall see presently how the intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression: he had seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to fate no quality but cruelty. Impassioned by what we may call patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for Greek epic: the story of a Greek contest with and victory over West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth the hand of the great enemy, fate. In different moods and at different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.
And the Odyssey? Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his old age. Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all. Someone says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than from that of Homer. I do not know. It is a better story than the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind. Yet it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are discrepant and incompatible parts.
There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed down unwritten for several centuries. Well; I can imagine the Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me Homer must have written or dictated them at first. Writing in Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times. It is now, anywhere, to illiterates. In Caesar's day, as he tells us, it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but the people did not. It seems probable that writing was not in general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me, certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of writing. Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since Lemurian days. When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.
Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer? What can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the picture I have attempted to make? Very little; yet perhaps something. I think his historical importance is greater, for us now, than his literary importance. I doubt you shall find in him as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example. I doubt he was an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious mind the truths that make men free. Plato did not altogether approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not fear to follow. I think the great Master-Poets of the world have been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul. I believe that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated. He pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation: his fame is chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and use their hats for speaking-trumpets. We have in English no approximately decent translation of him. Someone said that Pope served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince was moved to cry: "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!" It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true respect. Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would loathe Homer. Pope held that water should manifest, so to say, through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to be from the Kitchen-tap—or even from the sewer. Homer was more familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands. Which pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous sea-epithet: the thunder-on-the-precipices of
poluphloisboio thalasses,
or the lisping-on-the-sands of
poluphleesbeeo thalassace?
(pardon the attempted phonetics).—For truly there are advocates of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to Mr. Pope.