The Humour of Homer and Other Essays Part 3

And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple which is being dedicated to him and his wors.h.i.+p.

The existence of his son George was an after-thought and gave occasion for the second leading idea of the book--the story of a father trying to win the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in order to show himself worthy of it--and succeeding.

Butler's health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he was unfit to travel, but was determined to go, and was looking forward to meeting Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to accompany over the Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx.

But he did not get beyond Palermo; there he was so much worse that he could not leave his room. In a few weeks he was well enough to be removed to Naples, and Alfred went out and brought him home to London. He was taken to a nursing home in St. John's Wood where he lay for a month, attended by his old friend Dr. Dudgeon, and where he died on the 18th June, 1902.

There was a great deal he still wanted to do. He had intended to revise The Way of All Flesh, to write a book about Tabachetti, and to publish a new edition of Ex Voto with the mistakes corrected.

Also he wished to reconsider the articles reprinted in this volume and was looking forward to painting more sketches and composing more music. While lying ill and very feeble within a few days of the end, and not knowing whether it was to be the end or not, he said to me:

"I am much better to-day. I don't feel at all as though I were going to die. Of course, it will be all wrong if I do get well, for there is my literary position to be considered. First I write Erewhon--that is my opening subject; then, after modulating freely through all my other books and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my original key and write Erewhon Revisited.

Obviously, now is the proper moment to come to a full close, make my bow and retire; but I believe I am getting well after all. It's very inartistic, but I cannot help it."

Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he is serious or jesting. He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield: "Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as indeed who can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a fair amount of success." To veil his own earnestness he turned most naturally to humour, employing it in a spirit of reverence, as all the great humorists have done, to express his deepest and most serious convictions. He was aware that he ran the risk of being misunderstood by some, but he also knew that it is useless to try to please all, and, like Mozart, he wrote to please himself and a few intimate friends.

I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and sympathy; nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great and can never be known--it was sometimes exercised in unexpected ways, as when he gave my laundress a s.h.i.+lling because it was "such a beastly foggy morning"; nor of his slightly archaic courtliness-- unless among people he knew well he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail--he kept accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening, and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to say: "II sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete."

Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel's Six Great Fugues. He called this "The Old Man Fugue," and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by one who was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made young Ernest Pontifex in The Way of all Flesh offer it to Edward Overton as an epitaph for his Aunt Alethea. Butler, however, left off wanting any tombstone long before he died. In accordance with his wish his body was cremated, and a week later Alfred and I returned to Woking and buried his ashes under the shrubs in the garden of the crematorium, with nothing to mark the spot.

The Humour of Homer {59}

The first of the two great poems commonly ascribed to Homer is called the Iliad--a t.i.tle which we may be sure was not given it by the author. It professes to treat of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles that broke out while the Greeks were besieging the city of Troy, and it does, indeed, deal largely with the consequences of this quarrel; whether, however, the ostensible subject did not conceal another that was nearer the poet's heart--I mean the last days, death, and burial of Hector--is a point that I cannot determine. Nor yet can I determine how much of the Iliad as we now have it is by Homer, and how much by a later writer or writers.

This is a very vexed question, but I myself believe the Iliad to be entirely by a single poet.

The second poem commonly ascribed to the same author is called the Odyssey. It deals with the adventures of Ulysses during his ten years of wandering after Troy had fallen. These two works have of late years been believed to be by different authors. The Iliad is now generally held to be the older work by some one or two hundred years.

The leading ideas of the Iliad are love, war, and plunder, though this last is less insisted on than the other two. The key-note is struck with a woman's charms, and a quarrel among men for their possession. It is a woman who is at the bottom of the Trojan war itself. Woman throughout the Iliad is a being to be loved, teased, laughed at, and if necessary carried off. We are told in one place of a fine bronze cauldron for heating water which was worth twenty oxen, whereas a few lines lower down a good serviceable maid-of-all- work is valued at four oxen. I think there is a spice of malicious humour in this valuation, and am confirmed in this opinion by noting that though woman in the Iliad is on one occasion depicted as a wife so faithful and affectionate that nothing more perfect can be found either in real life or fiction, yet as a general rule she is drawn as teasing, scolding, thwarting, contradicting, and hoodwinking the s.e.x that has the effrontery to deem itself her lord and master.

Whether or no this view may have arisen from any domestic difficulties between Homer and his wife is a point which again I find it impossible to determine.

We cannot refrain from contemplating such possibilities. If we are to be at home with Homer there must be no sitting on the edge of one's chair dazzled by the splendour of his reputation. He was after all only a literary man, and those who occupy themselves with letters must approach him as a very honoured member of their own fraternity, but still as one who must have felt, thought, and acted much as themselves. He struck oil, while we for the most part succeed in boring only; still we are his literary brethren, and if we would read his lines intelligently we must also read between them. That one so shrewd, and yet a dreamer of such dreams as have been vouchsafed to few indeed besides himself--that one so genially sceptical, and so given to looking into the heart of a matter, should have been in such perfect harmony with his surroundings as to think himself in the best of all possible worlds--this is not believable. The world is always more or less out of joint to the poet--generally more so; and unfortunately he always thinks it more or less his business to set it right--generally more so. We are all of us more or less poets--generally, indeed, less so; still we feel and think, and to think at all is to be out of harmony with much that we think about. We may be sure, then, that Homer had his full share of troubles, and also that traces of these abound up and down his work if we could only identify them, for everything that everyone does is in some measure a portrait of himself; but here comes the difficulty--not to read between the lines, not to try and detect the hidden features of the writer--this is to be a dull, unsympathetic, incurious reader; and on the other hand to try and read between them is to be in danger of running after every Will o'

the Wisp that conceit may raise for our delusion.

I believe it will help you better to understand the broad humour of the Iliad, which we shall presently reach, if you will allow me to say a little more about the general characteristics of the poem.

Over and above the love and war that are his main themes, there is another which the author never loses sight of--I mean distrust and dislike of the ideas of his time as regards the G.o.ds and omens. No poet ever made G.o.ds in his own image more defiantly than the author of the Iliad. In the likeness of man created he them, and the only excuse for him is that he obviously desired his readers not to take them seriously. This at least is the impression he leaves upon his reader, and when so great a man as Homer leaves an impression it must be presumed that he does so intentionally. It may be almost said that he has made the G.o.ds take the worse, not the better, side of man's nature upon them, and to be in all respects as we ourselves--yet without virtue. It should be noted, however, that the G.o.ds on the Trojan side are treated far more leniently than those who help the Greeks.

The chief G.o.ds on the Grecian side are Juno, Minerva, and Neptune.

Juno, as you will shortly see, is a scolding wife, who in spite of all Jove's bl.u.s.ter wears the breeches, or tries exceedingly hard to do so. Minerva is an angry termagant--mean, mischief-making, and vindictive. She begins by pulling Achilles' hair, and later on she knocks the helmet from off the head of Mars. She hates Venus, and tells the Grecian hero Diomede that he had better not wound any of the other G.o.ds, but that he is to hit Venus if he can, which he presently does 'because he sees that she is feeble and not like Minerva or Bellona.' Neptune is a bitter hater.

Apollo, Mars, Venus, Diana, and Jove, so far as his wife will let him, are on the Trojan side. These, as I have said, meet with better, though still somewhat contemptuous, treatment at the poet's hand. Jove, however, is being mocked and laughed at from first to last, and if one moral can be drawn from the Iliad more clearly than another, it is that he is only to be trusted to a very limited extent. Homer's position, in fact, as regards divine interference is the very opposite of David's. David writes, "Put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man; there is no sure help but from the Lord." With Homer it is, "Put not your trust in Jove neither in any omen from heaven; there is but one good omen--to fight for one's country. Fortune favours the brave; heaven helps those who help themselves."

The G.o.d who comes off best is Vulcan, the lame, hobbling, old blacksmith, who is the laughing-stock of all the others, and whose exquisitely graceful skilful workmans.h.i.+p forms such an effective contrast to the uncouth exterior of the workman. Him, as a man of genius and an artist, and furthermore as a somewhat despised artist, Homer treats, if with playfulness, still with respect, in spite of the fact that circ.u.mstances have thrown him more on the side of the Greeks than of the Trojans, with whom I understand Homer's sympathies mainly to lie.

The poet either dislikes music or is at best insensible to it.

Great poets very commonly are so. Achilles, indeed, does on one occasion sing to his own accompaniment on the lyre, but we are not told that it was any pleasure to hear him, and Patroclus, who was in the tent at the time, was not enjoying it; he was only waiting for Achilles to leave off. But though not fond of music, Homer has a very keen sense of the beauties of nature, and is constantly referring both in and out of season to all manner of homely incidents that are as familiar to us as to himself. Sparks in the train of a shooting-star; a cloud of dust upon a high road; foresters going out to cut wood in a forest; the shrill cry of the cicale; children making walls of sand on the sea-sh.o.r.e, or teasing wasps when they have found a wasps' nest; a poor but very honest woman who gains a pittance for her children by selling wool, and weighs it very carefully; a child clinging to its mother's dress and crying to be taken up and carried--none of these things escape him.

Neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey do we ever receive so much as a hint as to the time of year at which any of the events described are happening; but on one occasion the author of the Iliad really has told us that it was a very fine day, and this not from a business point of view, but out of pure regard to the weather for its own sake.

With one more observation I will conclude my preliminary remarks about the Iliad. I cannot find its author within the four corners of the work itself. I believe the writer of the Odyssey to appear in the poem as a prominent and very fascinating character whom we shall presently meet, but there is no one in the Iliad on whom I can put my finger with even a pa.s.sing idea that he may be the author.

Still, if under some severe penalty I were compelled to find him, I should say it was just possible that he might consider his own lot to have been more or less like that which he forecasts for Astyanax, the infant son of Hector. At any rate his intimate acquaintance with the topography of Troy, which is now well ascertained, and still more his obvious attempt to excuse the non-existence of a great wall which, according to his story, ought to be there and which he knew had never existed, so that no trace could remain, while there were abundant traces of all the other features he describes--these facts convince me that he was in all probability a native of the Troad, or country round Troy. His plausibly concealed Trojan sympathies, and more particularly the aggravated exaggeration with which the flight of Hector is described, suggest to me, coming as they do from an astute and humorous writer, that he may have been a Trojan, at any rate by the mother's side, made captive, enslaved, compelled to sing the glories of his captors, and determined so to overdo them that if his masters cannot see through the irony others sooner or later shall. This, however, is highly speculative, and there are other views that are perhaps more true, but which I cannot now consider.

I will now ask you to form your own opinions as to whether Homer is or is not a shrewd and humorous writer.

Achilles, whose quarrel with Agamemnon is the ostensible subject of the poem, is son to a marine G.o.ddess named Thetis, who had rendered Jove an important service at a time when he was in great difficulties. Achilles, therefore, begs his mother Thetis to go up to Jove and ask him to let the Trojans discomfit the Greeks for a time, so that Agamemnon may find he cannot get on without Achilles'

help, and may thus be brought to reason.

Thetis tells her son that for the moment there is nothing to be done, inasmuch as the G.o.ds are all of them away from home. They are gone to pay a visit to Ocea.n.u.s in Central Africa, and will not be back for another ten or twelve days; she will see what can be done, however, as soon as ever they return. This in due course she does, going up to Olympus and laying hold of Jove by the knee and by the chin. I may say in pa.s.sing that it is still a common Italian form of salutation to catch people by the chin. Twice during the last summer I have been so seized in token of affectionate greeting, once by a lady and once by a gentleman.

Thetis tells her tale to Jove, and concludes by saying that he is to say straight out 'yes' or 'no' whether he will do what she asks. Of course he can please himself, but she should like to know how she stands.

"It will be a plaguy business," answers Jove, "for me to offend Juno and put up with all the bitter tongue she will give me. As it is, she is always nagging at me and saying I help the Trojans, still, go away now at once before she finds out that you have been here, and leave the rest to me. See, I nod my head to you, and this is the most solemn form of covenant into which I can enter. I never go back upon it, nor s.h.i.+lly-shally with anybody when I have once nodded my head." Which, by the way, amounts to an admission that he does s.h.i.+lly-shally sometimes.

Then he frowns and nods, shaking the hair on his immortal head till Olympus rocks again. Thetis goes off under the sea and Jove returns to his own palace. All the other G.o.ds stand up when they see him coming, for they do not dare to remain sitting while he pa.s.ses, but Juno knows he has been hatching mischief against the Greeks with Thetis, so she attacks him in the following words:

"You traitorous scoundrel," she exclaims, "which of the G.o.ds have you been taking into your counsel now? You are always trying to settle matters behind my back, and never tell me, if you can help it, a single word about your designs."

"'Juno,' replied the father of G.o.ds and men, 'you must not expect to be told everything that I am thinking about: you are my wife, it is true, but you might not be able always to understand my meaning; in so far as it is proper for you to know of my intentions you are the first person to whom I communicate them either among the G.o.ds or among mankind, but there are certain points which I reserve entirely for myself, and the less you try to pry into these, or meddle with them, the better for you.'"

"'Dread son of Saturn,' answered Juno, 'what in the world are you talking about? I meddle and pry? No one, I am sure, can have his own way in everything more absolutely than you have. Still I have a strong misgiving that the old merman's daughter Thetis has been talking you over. I saw her hugging your knees this very self-same morning, and I suspect you have been promising her to kill any number of people down at the Grecian s.h.i.+ps, in order to gratify Achilles.'"

"'Wife,' replied Jove, 'I can do nothing but you suspect me. You will not do yourself any good, for the more you go on like that the more I dislike you, and it may fare badly with you. If I mean to have it so, I mean to have it so, you had better therefore sit still and hold your tongue as I tell you, for if I once begin to lay my hands about you, there is not a G.o.d in heaven who will be of the smallest use to you.'

"When Juno heard this she thought it better to submit, so she sat down without a word, but all the G.o.ds throughout Jove's mansion were very much perturbed. Presently the cunning workman Vulcan tried to pacify his mother Juno, and said, 'It will never do for you two to go on quarrelling and setting heaven in an uproar about a pack of mortals. The thing will not bear talking about. If such counsels are to prevail a G.o.d will not be able to get his dinner in peace.

Let me then advise my mother (and I am sure it is her own opinion) to make her peace with my dear father, lest he should scold her still further, and spoil our banquet; for if he does wish to turn us all out there can be no question about his being perfectly able to do so. Say something civil to him, therefore, and then perhaps he will not hurt us.'

"As he spoke he took a large cup of nectar and put it into his mother's hands, saying, 'Bear it, my dear mother, and make the best of it. I love you dearly and should be very sorry to see you get a thras.h.i.+ng. I should not be able to help you, for my father Jove is not a safe person to differ from. You know once before when I was trying to help you he caught me by the foot and chucked me from the heavenly threshold. I was all day long falling from morn to eve, but at sunset I came to ground on the island of Lemnos, and there was very little life left in me, till the Sintians came and tended me.'

"On this Juno smiled, and with a laugh took the cup from her son's hand. Then Vulcan went about among all other G.o.ds drawing nectar for them from his goblet, and they laughed immoderately as they saw him bustling about the heavenly mansion."

Then presently the G.o.ds go home to bed, each one in his own house that Vulcan had cunningly built for him or her. Finally Jove himself went to the bed which he generally occupied; and Jove his wife went with him.

There is another quarrel between Jove and Juno at the beginning of the fourth book.

The G.o.ds are sitting on the golden floor of Jove's palace and drinking one another's health in the nectar with which Hebe from time to time supplies them. Jove begins to tease Juno, and to provoke her with some sarcastic remarks that are pointed at her though not addressed to her directly.

"'Menelaus,' he exclaimed, 'has two good friends among the G.o.ddesses, Juno and Minerva, but they only sit still and look on, while Venus on the other hand takes much better care of Paris, and defends him when he is in danger. She has only just this moment been rescuing him when he made sure he was at death's door, for the victory really did lie with Menelaus. We must think what we are to do about all this. Shall we renew strife between the combatants or shall we make them friends again? I think the best plan would be for the City of Priam to remain unpillaged, but for Menelaus to have his wife Helen sent back to him.'

"Minerva and Juno groaned in spirit when they heard this. They were sitting side by side, and thinking what mischief they could do to the Trojans. Minerva for her part said not one word, but sat scowling at her father, for she was in a furious pa.s.sion with him, but Juno could not contain herself, so she said--

"'What, pray, son of Saturn, is all this about? Is my trouble then to go for nothing, and all the pains that I have taken, to say nothing of my horses, and the way we have sweated and toiled to get the people together against Priam and his children? You can do as you please, but you must not expect all of us to agree with you.'

"And Jove answered, 'Wife, what harm have Priam and Priam's children done you that you rage so furiously against them, and want to sack their city? Will nothing do for you but you must eat Priam with his sons and all the Trojans into the bargain? Have it your own way then, for I will not quarrel with you--only remember what I tell you: if at any time I want to sack a city that belongs to any friend of yours, it will be no use your trying to hinder me, you will have to let me do it, for I only yield to you now with the greatest reluctance. If there was one city under the sun which I respected more than another it was Troy with its king and people.

My altars there have never been without the savour of fat or of burnt sacrifice and all my dues were paid.'

"'My own favourite cities,' answered Juno, 'are Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae. Sack them whenever you may be displeased with them. I shall not make the smallest protest against your doing so. It would be no use if I did, for you are much stronger than I am, only I will not submit to seeing my own work wasted. I am a G.o.ddess of the same race as yourself. I am Saturn's eldest daughter and am not only nearly related to you in blood, but I am wife to yourself, and you are king over the G.o.ds. Let it be a case, then, of give and take between us, and the other G.o.ds will follow our lead. Tell Minerva, therefore, to go down at once and set the Greeks and Trojans by the ears again, and let her so manage it that the Trojans shall break their oaths and be the aggressors.'"

This is the very thing to suit Minerva, so she goes at once and persuades the Trojans to break their oath.