The Humour of Homer and Other Essays Part 4

In a later book we are told that Jove has positively forbidden the G.o.ds to interfere further in the struggle. Juno therefore determines to hoodwink him. First she bolted herself inside her own room on the top of Mount Ida and had a thorough good wash. Then she scented herself, brushed her golden hair, put on her very best dress and all her jewels. When she had done this, she went to Venus and besought her for the loan of her charms.

"'You must not be angry with me, Venus,' she began, 'for being on the Grecian side while you are yourself on the Trojan; but you know every one falls in love with you at once, and I want you to lend me some of your attractions. I have to pay a visit at the world's end to Ocea.n.u.s and Mother Tethys. They took me in and were very good to me when Jove turned Saturn out of heaven and shut him up under the sea. They have been quarrelling this long time past and will not speak to one another. So I must go and see them, for if I can only make them friends again I am sure that they will be grateful to me for ever afterwards.'"

Venus thought this reasonable, so she took off her girdle and lent it to Juno, an act by the way which argues more good nature than prudence on her part. Then Juno goes down to Thrace, and in search of Sleep the brother of Death. She finds him and shakes hands with him. Then she tells him she is going up to Olympus to make love to Jove, and that while she is occupying his attention Sleep is to send him off into a deep slumber.

Sleep says he dares not do it. He would lull any of the other G.o.ds, but Juno must remember that she had got him into a great sc.r.a.pe once before in this way, and Jove hurled the G.o.ds about all over the palace, and would have made an end of him once for all, if he had not fled under the protection of Night, whom Jove did not venture to offend.

Juno bribes him, however, with a promise that if he will consent she will marry him to the youngest of the Graces, Pasithea. On this he yields; the pair then go up to the top of Mount Ida, and Sleep gets into a high pine tree just in front of Jove.

As soon as Jove sees Juno, armed as she for the moment was with all the attractions of Venus, he falls desperately in love with her, and says she is the only G.o.ddess he ever really loved. True, there had been the wife of Ixion and Danae, and Europa and Semele, and Alcmena, and Latona, not to mention herself in days gone by, but he never loved any of these as he now loved her, in spite of his having been married to her for so many years. What then does she want?

Juno tells him the same rigmarole about Ocea.n.u.s and Mother Tethys that she had told Venus, and when she has done Jove tries to embrace her.

"What," exclaims Juno, "kiss me in such a public place as the top of Mount Ida! Impossible! I could never show my face in Olympus again, but I have a private room of my own and"--"What nonsense, my love!" exclaims the sire of G.o.ds and men as he catches her in his arms. On this Sleep sends him into a deep slumber, and Juno then sends Sleep to bid Neptune go off to help the Greeks at once.

When Jove awakes and finds the trick that has been played upon him, he is very angry and bl.u.s.ters a good deal as usual, but somehow or another it turns out that he has got to stand it and make the best of it.

In an earlier book he has said that he is not surprised at anything Juno may do, for she always has crossed him and always will; but he cannot put up with such disobedience from his own daughter Minerva.

Somehow or another, however, here too as usual it turns out that he has got to stand it. "And then," Minerva exclaims in yet another place (VIII. 373), "I suppose he will be calling me his grey-eyed darling again, presently."

Towards the end of the poem the G.o.ds have a set-to among themselves.

Minerva sends Mars sprawling, Venus comes to his a.s.sistance, but Minerva knocks her down and leaves her. Neptune challenges Apollo, but Apollo says it is not proper for a G.o.d to fight his own uncle, and declines the contest. His sister Diana taunts him with cowardice, so Juno grips her by the wrist and boxes her ears till she writhes again. Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, then challenges Mercury, but Mercury says that he is not going to fight with any of Jove's wives, so if she chooses to say she has beaten him she is welcome to do so. Then Latona picks up poor Diana's bow and arrows that have fallen from her during her encounter with Juno, and Diana meanwhile flies up to the knees of her father Jove, sobbing and sighing till her ambrosial robe trembles all around her.

"Jove drew her towards him, and smiling pleasantly exclaimed, 'My dear child, which of the heavenly beings has been wicked enough to behave in this way to you, as though you had been doing something naughty?'

"'Your wife, Juno,' answered Diana, 'has been ill-treating me; all our quarrels always begin with her.'"

The above extracts must suffice as examples of the kind of divine comedy in which Homer brings the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses upon the scene.

Among mortals the humour, what there is of it, is confined mainly to the grim taunts which the heroes fling at one another when they are fighting, and more especially to crowing over a fallen foe. The most subtle pa.s.sage is the one in which Briseis, the captive woman about whom Achilles and Agamemnon have quarrelled, is restored by Agamemnon to Achilles. Briseis on her return to the tent of Achilles finds that while she has been with Agamemnon, Patroclus has been killed by Hector, and his dead body is now lying in state. She flings herself upon the corpse and exclaims--

"How one misfortune does keep falling upon me after another! I saw the man to whom my father and mother had married me killed before my eyes, and my three own dear brothers perished along with him; but you, Patroclus, even when Achilles was sacking our city and killing my husband, told me that I was not to cry; for you said that Achilles himself should marry me, and take me back with him to Phthia, where we should have a wedding feast among the Myrmidons.

You were always kind to me, and I should never cease to grieve for you."

This may of course be seriously intended, but Homer was an acute writer, and if we had met with such a pa.s.sage in Thackeray we should have taken him to mean that so long as a woman can get a new husband, she does not much care about losing the old one--a sentiment which I hope no one will imagine that I for one moment endorse or approve of, and which I can only explain as a piece of sarcasm aimed possibly at Mrs. Homer.

And now let us turn to the Odyssey, a work which I myself think of as the Iliad's better half or wife. Here we have a poem of more varied interest, instinct with not less genius, and on the whole I should say, if less robust, nevertheless of still greater fascination--one, moreover, the irony of which is pointed neither at G.o.ds nor woman, but with one single and perhaps intercalated exception, at man. G.o.ds and women may sometimes do wrong things, but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just referred to, they are never laughed at. The scepticism of the Iliad is that of Hume or Gibbon; that of the Odyssey (if any) is like the occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter. When Jove says he will do a thing, there is no uncertainty about his doing it.

Juno hardly appears at all, and when she does she never quarrels with her husband. Minerva has more to do than any of the other G.o.ds or G.o.ddesses, but she has nothing in common with the Minerva whom we have already seen in the Iliad. In the Odyssey she is the fairy G.o.d-mother who seems to have no object in life but to protect Ulysses and Telemachus, and keep them straight at any touch and turn of difficulty. If she has any other function, it is to be patroness of the arts and of all intellectual development. The Minerva of the Odyssey may indeed sit on a rafter like a swallow and hold up her aegis to strike panic into the suitors while Ulysses kills them; but she is a perfect lady, and would no more knock Mars and Venus down one after the other than she would stand on her head. She is, in fact, a distinct person in all respects from the Minerva of the Iliad. Of the remaining G.o.ds Neptune, as the persecutor of the hero, comes worst off; but even he is treated as though he were a very important person.

In the Odyssey the G.o.ds no longer live in houses and sleep in four- post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. n.o.body knows exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there is neither rain nor hail nor snow, and the wind never beats roughly; but it abides in everlasting suns.h.i.+ne, and in great peacefulness of light wherein the blessed G.o.ds are illumined for ever and ever. It is hardly possible to conceive anything more different from the Olympus of the Iliad.

Another very material point of difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of detail. Thus the giant Polyphemus drives in his ewes home from their pasture, and milks them. The lambs of course have not been running with them; they have been left in the yards, so they have had nothing to eat. When he has milked the ewes, the giant lets each one of them have her lamb--to get, I suppose, what strippings it can, and beyond this what milk the ewe may yield during the night. In the morning, however, Polyphemus milks the ewes again.

Hence it is plain either that he expected his lambs to thrive on one pull per diem at a milked ewe, and to be kind enough not to suck their mothers, though left with them all night through, or else that the writer of the Odyssey had very hazy notions about the relations between lambs and ewes, and of the ordinary methods of procedure on an upland dairy-farm.

In nautical matters the same inexperience is betrayed. The writer knows all about the corn and wine that must be put on board; the store-room in which these are kept and the getting of them are described inimitably, but there the knowledge ends; the other things put on board are "the things that are generally taken on board s.h.i.+ps." So on a voyage we are told that the sailors do whatever is wanted doing, but we have no details. There is a s.h.i.+pwreck, which does duty more than once without the alteration of a word. I have seen such a s.h.i.+pwreck at Drury Lane. Anyone, moreover, who reads any authentic account of actual adventures will perceive at once that those of the Odyssey are the creation of one who has had no history. Ulysses has to make a raft; he makes it about as broad as they generally make a good big s.h.i.+p, but we do not seem to have been at the pains to measure a good big s.h.i.+p.

I will add no more however on this head. The leading characteristics of the Iliad, as we saw, were love, war, and plunder. The leading idea of the Odyssey is the infatuation of man, and the key-note is struck in the opening paragraph, where we are told how the sailors of Ulysses must needs, in spite of every warning, kill and eat the cattle of the sun-G.o.d, and perished accordingly.

A few lines lower down the same note is struck with even greater emphasis. The G.o.ds have met in council, and Jove happens at the moment to be thinking of AEgisthus, who had met his death at the hand of Agamemnon's son Orestes, in spite of the solemn warning that Jove had sent him through the mouth of Mercury. It does not seem necessary for Jove to turn his attention to Clytemnestra, the partner of AEgisthus's guilt. Of this lady we are presently told that she was naturally of an excellent disposition, and would never have gone wrong but for the loss of the protector in whose charge Agamemnon had left her. When she was left alone without an adviser-- well, if a base designing man took to flattering and misleading her--what else could be expected? The infatuation of man, with its corollary, the superior excellence of woman, is the leading theme; next to this come art, religion, and, I am almost ashamed to add, money. There is no love-business in the Odyssey except the return of a bald elderly married man to his elderly wife and grown-up son after an absence of twenty years, and furious at having been robbed of so much money in the meantime. But this can hardly be called love-business; it is at the utmost domesticity. There is a charming young princess, Nausicaa, but though she affects a pa.s.sing tenderness for the elderly hero of her creation as soon as Minerva has curled his bald old hair for him and t.i.ttivated him up all over, she makes it abundantly plain that she will not look at a single one of her actual flesh and blood admirers. There is a leading young gentleman, Telemachus, who is nothing if he is not [Greek], or canny, well-principled, and discreet; he has an amiable and most sensible young male friend who says that he does not like crying at meal times--he will cry in the forenoon on an empty stomach as much as anyone pleases, but he cannot attend properly to his dinner and cry at the same time. Well, there is no lady provided either for this nice young man or for Telemachus. They are left high and dry as bachelors. Two G.o.ddesses indeed, Circe and Calypso, do one after the other take possession of Ulysses, but the way in which he accepts a situation which after all was none of his seeking, and which it is plain he does not care two straws about, is, I believe, dictated solely by a desire to exhibit the easy infidelity of Ulysses himself in contrast with the unswerving constancy and fidelity of his wife Penelope. Throughout the Odyssey the men do not really care for women, nor the women for men; they have to pretend to do so now and again, but it is a got-up thing, and the general att.i.tude of the s.e.xes towards one another is very much that of Helen, who says that her husband Menelaus is really not deficient in person or understanding: or again of Penelope herself, who, on being asked by Ulysses on his return what she thought of him, said that she did not think very much of him nor very little of him; in fact, she did not think much about him one way or the other. True, later on she relents and becomes more effusive; in fact, when she and Ulysses sat up talking in bed and Ulysses told her the story of his adventures, she never went to sleep once. Ulysses never had to nudge her with his elbow and say, "Come, wake up, Penelope, you are not listening"; but, in spite of the devotion exhibited here, the love-business in the Odyssey is artificial and described by one who had never felt it, whereas in the Iliad it is spontaneous and obviously genuine, as by one who knows all about it perfectly well.

The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on the gas--when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.

A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his treatment of her s.e.x by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place--this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture to say that if the Odyssey were to appear anonymously for the first time now, and to be sent round to the papers for review, there is not even a professional critic who would not see that it is a woman's writing and not a man's. But letting this pa.s.s, I can hardly doubt, for reasons which I gave in yesterday's Athenaeum, and for others that I cannot now insist upon, that the poem was written by a native of Trapani on the coast of Sicily, near Marsala. Fancy what the position of a young, ardent, brilliant woman must have been in a small Sicilian sea-port, say some eight or nine hundred years before the birth of Christ. It makes one shudder to think of it. Night after night she hears the dreary blind old bard Demodocus drawl out his interminable recitals taken from our present Iliad, or from some other of the many poems now lost that dealt with the adventures of the Greeks before Troy or on their homeward journey. Man and his doings! always the same old story, and woman always to be treated either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore and b.o.o.by, man?

"I wish, my dear," exclaims her mother Arete, after one of these little outbreaks, "that you would do it yourself. I am sure you could do it beautifully if you would only give your mind to it."

"Very well, mother," she replies, "and I will bring in all about you and father, and how I go out for a was.h.i.+ng-day with the maids,"--and she kept her word, as I will presently show you.

I should tell you that Ulysses, having got away from the G.o.ddess Calypso, with whom he had been living for some seven or eight years on a lonely and very distant island in mid-ocean, is s.h.i.+pwrecked on the coast of Phaeacia, the chief town of which is Scheria. After swimming some forty-eight hours in the water he effects a landing at the mouth of a stream, and, not having a rag of clothes on his back, covers himself up under a heap of dried leaves and goes to sleep. I will now translate from the Odyssey itself.

"So here Ulysses slept, worn out with labour and sorrow; but Minerva went off to the chief town of the Phaeacians, a people who used to live in Hypereia near the wicked Cyclopes. Now the Cyclopes were stronger than they and plundered them, so Nausithous settled them in Scheria far from those who would loot them. He ran a wall round about the city, built houses and temples, and allotted the lands among his people; but he was gathered to his fathers, and the good king Alcinous was now reigning. To his palace then Minerva hastened that she might help Ulysses to get home.

"She went straight to the painted bedroom of Nausicaa, who was daughter to King Alcinous, and lovely as a G.o.ddess. Near her there slept two maids-in-waiting, both very pretty, one on either side of the doorway, which was closed with a beautifully made door. She took the form of the famous Captain Dumas's daughter, who was a bosom friend of Nausicaa and just her own age; then coming into the room like a breath of wind she stood near the head of the bed and said--

"'Nausicaa, what could your mother have been about to have such a lazy daughter? Here are your clothes all lying in disorder, yet you are going to be married almost directly, and should not only be well-dressed yourself, but should see that those about you look clean and tidy also. This is the way to make people speak well of you, and it will please your father and mother, so suppose we make to-morrow a was.h.i.+ng day, and begin the first thing in the morning.

I will come and help you, for all the best young men among your own people are courting you, and you are not going to remain a maid much longer. Ask your father, then, to have a horse and cart ready for us at daybreak to take the linen and baskets, and you can ride too, which will be much pleasanter for you than walking, for the was.h.i.+ng ground is a long way out of the town.'

"When she had thus spoken Minerva went back to Olympus. By and by morning came, and as soon as Nausicaa woke she began thinking about her dream. She went to the other end of the house to tell her father and mother all about it, and found them in their own room.

Her mother was sitting by the fireside spinning with her maids-in- waiting all around her, and she happened to catch her father just as he was going out to attend a meeting of the Town Council which the Phaeacian aldermen had convened. So she stopped him and said, 'Papa, dear, could you manage to let me have a good big waggon? I want to take all our dirty clothes to the river and wash them. You are the chief man here, so you ought to have a clean s.h.i.+rt on when you attend meetings of the Council. Moreover, you have five sons at home, two of them married and the other three are good-looking young bachelors; you know they always like to have clean linen when they go out to a dance, and I have been thinking about all this.'"

You will observe that though Nausicaa dreams that she is going to be married shortly, and that all the best young men of Scheria are in love with her, she does not dream that she has fallen in love with any one of them in particular, and that thus every preparation is made for her getting married except the selection of the bridegroom.

You will also note that Nausicaa has to keep her father up to putting a clean s.h.i.+rt on when he ought to have one, whereas her young brothers appear to keep herself up to having a clean s.h.i.+rt ready for them when they want one. These little touches are so lifelike and so feminine that they suggest drawing from life by a female member of Alcinous's own family who knew his character from behind the scenes.

I would also say before proceeding further that in some parts of France and Germany it is still the custom to have but one or at most two great was.h.i.+ng days in the year. Each household is provided with an enormous quant.i.ty of linen, which when dirty is just soaked and rinsed, and then put aside till the great was.h.i.+ng day of the year.

This is why Nausicaa wants a waggon, and has to go so far afield.

If it was only a few collars and a pocket-handkerchief or two she could no doubt have found water enough near at hand. The big spring or autumn wash, however, is evidently intended.

Returning now to the Odyssey, when he had heard what Nausicaa wanted Alcinous said:

"'You shall have the mules, my love, and whatever else you have a mind for, so be off with you.'

"Then he told the servants, and they got the waggon out and harnessed the mules, while the princess brought the clothes down from the linen room and placed them on the waggon. Her mother got ready a nice basket of provisions with all sorts of good things, and a goatskin full of wine. The princess now got into the waggon, and her mother gave her a golden cruse of oil that she and her maids might anoint themselves.

"Then Nausicaa took the whip and reins and gave the mules a touch which sent them off at a good pace. They pulled without nagging, and carried not only Nausicaa and her wash of clothes, but the women also who were with her.

"When they got to the river they went to the was.h.i.+ng pools, through which even in summer there ran enough pure water to wash any quant.i.ty of linen, no matter how dirty. Here they unharnessed the mules and turned them out to feed in the sweet juicy gra.s.s that grew by the river-side. They got the clothes out of the waggon, brought them to the water, and vied with one another in treading upon them and banging them about to get the dirt out of them. When they had got them quite clean, they laid them out by the seaside where the waves had raised a high beach of s.h.i.+ngle, and set about was.h.i.+ng and anointing themselves with olive oil. Then they got their dinner by the side of the river, and waited for the sun to finish drying the clothes. By and by, after dinner, they took off their head-dresses and began to play at ball, and Nausicaa sang to them."

I think you will agree with me that there is no haziness--no milking of ewes that have had a lamb with them all night--here. The writer is at home and on her own ground.

"When they had done folding the clothes and were putting the mules to the waggon before starting home again, Minerva thought it was time Ulysses should wake up and see the handsome girl who was to take him to the city of the Phaeacians. So the princess threw a ball at one of the maids, which missed the maid and fell into the water. On this they all shouted, and the noise they made woke up Ulysses, who sat up in his bed of leaves and wondered where in the world he could have got to.

"Then he crept from under the bush beneath which he had slept, broke off a thick bough so as to cover his nakedness, and advanced towards Nausicaa and her maids; these last all ran away, but Nausicaa stood her ground, for Minerva had put courage into her heart, so she kept quite still, and Ulysses could not make up his mind whether it would be better to go up to her, throw himself at her feet, and embrace her knees as a suppliant--[in which case, of course, he would have to drop the bough] or whether it would be better for him to make an apology to her at a reasonable distance, and ask her to be good enough to give him some clothes and show him the way to the town.

On the whole he thought it would be better to keep at arm's length, in case the princess should take offence at his coming too near her."

Let me say in pa.s.sing that this is one of many pa.s.sages which have led me to conclude that the Odyssey is written by a woman. A girl, such as Nausicaa describes herself, young, unmarried, unattached, and hence, after all, knowing little of what men feel on these matters, having by a cruel freak of inspiration got her hero into such an awkward predicament, might conceivably imagine that he would argue as she represents him, but no man, except such a woman's tailor as could never have written such a masterpiece as the Odyssey, would ever get his hero into such an undignified sc.r.a.pe at all, much less represent him as arguing as Ulysses does. I suppose Minerva was so busy making Nausicaa brave that she had no time to put a little sense into Ulysses' head, and remind him that he was nothing if not full of sagacity and resource. To return--