The scenery of the cave of Calypso[782] is less restrained in its cast, than is the garden in Scheria; but even here Homer introduces four fountains, which compose a regular figure, and are evidently meant to supply an element of form which was required by the fashionable standard.
Another element of landscape, as we understand it, is, that the natural objects which it represents should be in rather extensive combination; and our established traditions would also require that the view of them should be modified by the rendering of the atmosphere, especially with reference to the scale of distances.
It is very difficult to find instances of extended landscape in Homer. But I think that we have at least one, in the famed simile, where he compares the Trojan watchfires on the plain to the calm night, which by the light of moon and stars exhibits a breadth of prospect to the rejoicing shepherd’s eye. Here are certainly tranquillity and order; but with them we seem also to have both extent and atmosphere; to which even bold and even broken outline must be added by those who, like myself, are not prepared to surrender to the destroying ὄβελος the line[783]
ἔκ τ’ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ, καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι.
Upon the whole, considering Homer’s early date, and the very late development among the moderns of a taste for scenery of the picturesque and romantic order, I do not know that we are entitled even at first sight to challenge him as inferior to any modern of analogous date in this province. Yet we may fairly pronounce that he is inferior to himself; that is to say, he appears to have a sense of beauty, in the region of inanimate nature, certainly less keen in proportion than that, with which he looked upon the animated creation.
What is deficient in him with respect to landscape may however, in all likelihood, be more justly referred to positive than to negative causes.
Causes adverse to a more developed feeling.
It may be questioned whether the disposition to appreciate still nature, especially in large and elaborated combinations, may not in part depend upon conditions that were not to be found in the age of Homer. I should say, if the expression may be allowed, that we of this generation take landscape medicinally. Human life grows with the course of ages; and, especially in our age, it has grown to be excited and hurried. But nature has a reacting tendency towards repose; and, even in the case of the grosser stimulants, it seems to be their soothing power which most helps to recommend them. Besides the fact, however, that we have wants which the Greeks had not, this subject may be regarded in a broader view.
The mind of Homer and the mind of his age were not addicted even to contemplation, far less to introspection. Of ideas properly subjective there are very few indeed to be found in the poems. We have one such furnished by the passage where he equates thought to a wing, in a simile for the swift ships of the Phæacians,
ὡσεὶ πτέρον ἠὲ νόημα.