And, indeed, he had no other form in which to speak forth his soul. That which we call the invention of the Greeks at work upon the subject-matter of religion was, in fact, the voice of human nature, giving expression in the easiest and simplest manner to its sense of the great objects and powers amidst which its lot was cast. It has been well said by Professor M. Müller, in an able Essay[20] on ‘Comparative Mythology,’ that ‘abstract speech is more difficult, than the fulness of a poet’s sympathy with nature.’ Thus it was not so much that poetry usurped the office of religion, as that their respective functions brought them of necessity to a common ground and a common form of proceeding. Homer saw, heard, or felt the action of the sun, the moon, the stars, the atmosphere, the winds, the sea, the rivers, the fountains, the soil; and he knew of family affections, of governing powers, of a healing art, of a gift and skill of mechanical construction. Action, in each of these departments, could not but be referred to a power. How was that power to be expressed?
On Impersonation in Homer.
At least for the Greek mind, less subtle, as Aristotle has observed, than the Oriental, it was more natural to deal with persons, than with metaphysical abstractions. It was foreign to the mental habit of the heroic age to conceive of abstract essences; as it still remains difficult, more difficult perhaps than, in the looseness of our mental processes, we suppose, for the men of our own generation. Even now, in the old age of the world, we have many signs of this natural difficulty, which formerly was a kind of impossibility. Especially we have that one which leads all communities, and above all their least instructed classes, to apply the personal pronouns he or she to a vast multitude of inanimate objects, both natural, and the products of human skill and labour. These objects are generally such as stand in a certain relation to action: they either do, suffer, or contain.
If then the Nature-forces could not be expressed, or at least could not be understood as abstractions, to express them as persons was the only other course open to the poet. It was not an effort to follow this method: it would have required great effort to adopt any other. How spontaneous was the impulse which thus generated the mythological system, we may observe from this, that it not only personified in cases where, an agency being seen, its fountain was concealed from view, but it likewise went very far towards personification even in cases where inanimate instruments were wielded by human beings, and where, as the source of the phenomenon was perceived, there was no occasion to clothe it with a separate vitality. Hence that copious vivifying power which Homer has poured like a flood through his verse. Hence his bitter arrow (πικρὸς), his darts hungry for human blood (λιλαιόμενα χρόος ἆσαι), his ground laughing in the blaze of the gleaming armour (γέλασσε δὲ πᾶσα περὶ χθὼν χαλκοῦ ὑπὸ στεροπῆς). Hence again his free use of sensible imagery to illustrate metaphysical ideas: for example, his black cloud of grief, his black pains, his purple death[21]. Hence that singularly beautiful passage on the weeping of the deathless horses of Achilles for Patroclus[22]. Hence too it is, that he does not scruple to carry imagery, drawn from the sphere of one sense, into the domain of another, an operation which later poets have found so difficult and hazardous. He has an iron din[23], a brazen voice[24], a brazen or iron heaven[25], a howling or shouting fire, a blaze of lamentation[26]. Hence, by a system of figure bolder perhaps than has been used by any other poet, he invests the works of high art in metal with the attributes of life and motion. This daring system reaches its climax in the damsel satellites[27] of gold, that support the limping gait of Vulcan: in the dogs of metal, that guard the palace of Alcinous: in the elastic arms of Achilles, which, so far from being a weight upon him, themselves lift him from the ground: and in the animated ships of the Phæacians, which are taught by instinct to speed across the sea, and to pilot their own course to the points of their destination[28]. On every side we see a redundance of life, shaping, and even forcing, for itself new channels: and thus it becomes more easy for us to conceive the important truth that, when he impersonates, he simply takes what was for him the easiest and the most effective way to describe. Every where he is carrying on a double process of action and reaction: on the one hand bringing Deity down to sensible forms; on the other, adorning and elevating humanity, and inanimate nature, with every divine endowment.
Nature of the myths of Homer.
Homer, then, is full of mythical matter. But the word myth, of which in recent controversies the use has been so frequent, is capable of being viewed under either of two principal aspects.
In one of these, it signifies a story which is not contemporary with the date of the facts it purports to relate, but is in reality an after-view of them, which colours its subject, and exaggerates, ad libitum, according to conditions of thought and feeling which have arisen in the interval.
In the other of these senses, it is an allegory which has simply lost its counterpart: it was true, but by separation from that which attached it to fact, it has become untrue: being now of necessity handled, if handled at all, as a substantive existence, it has passed into a fable, and is only distinguished from pure fable, in that it once indicated truths contemporary with itself, though probably truths lying in a different region from its own.
It is in this last sense that the term myth is chiefly, and most legitimately, applicable to the religious system of the Homeric poems: but they may also probably contain more or less of the mythical element in the former sense.
We, having obtained knowledge of the early derivation and distribution of mankind, and of the primitive religion, from sources other than those open to Homer, shall find in this knowledge the lost counterpart of a great portion of the Homeric myths.