Full fifty purple figs; and many a row Smit with the signs which all his doubts explain, To this Ulysses: "As the gods shall please Be all the rest; and set thy soul at ease. Haste to the cottage by this orchard side; And take the banquet which our cares provide: There wait thy faithful band of rural friends; And there the young Telemachus attends." Thus having said, they traced the garden o'er, And stooping enter'd at the lowly door. The swains and young Telemachus they found, The victim portion'd, and the goblet crown'd. The hoary king, his old Sicilian maid Perfumed and wash'd, and gorgeously array'd. Pallas attending gives his frame to shine With awful port, and majesty divine; His gazing son admires the godlike grace, And air celestial dawning o'er his face. "What god (he cried) my father's form improves? How high he treads, and how enlarged he moves!" "Oh! would to all the deathless powers on high, Pallas and Jove, and him who gilds the sky! The swains, fatigued with labours of the day; Who nursed the children, and now tends the sire: Beyond our hopes, and to our wish, return'd! Could work this wonder: welcome to thy own! Each faithful youth, and breathes out ardent vows; Now flying fame the swift report had spread Big was his eye with tears, his heart with woes: has wrought, And mighty blessings to his country brought. Here ceased he, but indignant tears let fall Spoke when he ceased: dumb sorrow touch'd them all. When from the palace to the wondering throng "Hear me, ye peers and elders of the land, Who deem this act the work of mortal hand! As o'er the heaps of death Ulysses strode, These eyes, these eyes beheld a present god, Who now before him, now beside him stood, Fought as he fought, and mark'd his way with blood: In vain old Mentor's form the god belied; "Twas heaven that struck, and heaven was on his side." A sudden horror all the assembly shook; When, slowly rising, Halitherses spoke, (Reverend and wise, whose comprehensive view At once the present and the future knew :) "Me too, ye fathers, hear! from you proceed The ills ye mourn: your own the guilty deed. Ye gave your sons, your lawless sons, the rein, (Oft warn'd by Mentor and myself in vain :) An absent hero's bed they sought to soil; An absent hero's wealth they made their spoil: Immoderate riot, and intemperate lust! The offence was great, the punishment was just. by own! BOOTH 防 Weigh then my counsels in an equal scale, His moderate words some better minds persuade: They meet: Eupithes heads the frantic train. May I presume to search thy secret soul? "Is not thy thought my own? (the god replies The suffering hero felt his patient breast Regard thyself, the living, and the dead." "Thy eyes, great father! on this battle cast, Shall learn from me Penelope was chaste." So spoke Telemachus! the gallant boy The day that shows me, ere I close my eyes, "Son of Arcesius, reverend warrior, hear! run. Now by the sword and now the javelin fall Fear shook the nations: at the voice divine But Jove's red arm the burning thunder aims; So Pallas spoke: the mandate from above POSTSCRIPT TO THE ODYSSEY I CANNOT dismiss this work without a few observations on the true character and style of it. Whoever reads the Odyssey with an eye to the Iliad, expecting to find it of the same character, or of the same sort of spirit, will be grievously deceived; and err against the first principle of criticism, which is to consider the nature of the piece, and the intent of its author. The Odyssey is a moral and political work, instructive to all degrees of men, and filled with images, examples, and precepts of civil and domestic life. Homer is here a person Qui didicit patriæ quid debeat, et quid amicis, The Odyssey is the reverse of the Iliad, in moral, It is no wonder that the common reader should fall into this mistake, when so great a critic as Longinus seems not wholly free from it; although what he has said has been generally understood to import a severer censure of the Odyssey than it really does, if we consider the occasion on which it is introduced, and the circumstances to which it is confined. "The Odyssey (says he) is an instance, how natural it is to a great genius, when it begins to grow old and decline, to delight itself in narrations and fables: for, that Homer composed the Odyssey after the Iliad, many proofs may be given, &c. From hence in my judgment it proceeds, that as the Iliad was written while his spirit was in its greatest vigour, the whole structure of that work is dramatic and full of action: whereas the greater part of the Odyssey is employed in narration, which is the taste of old age; so that in this latter piece we may compare him to the setting sun, which has still the same greatness, but not the same ardour, or force. He speaks not in the same strain: we see no more that sublime of the Iliad which marches on with a constant pace, without ever being stopped, or retarded; there appears no more that hurry, and that strong tide of motions and passions, pouring one after another: there is no more the same fury, or the same volubility of diction, so suitable to action, and all along drawing in such innumerable images of nature. But Homer, like the ocean, is always great, even when he ebbs and retires; even when he is lowest, and loses him self most in narrations and credible fictions: as instances of this, we cannot forget the descriptions of tempests, the adventures of Ulysses with the Cyclops, and many others. But though all this be age, it is the age of Homer:-and it may be said, for the credit of these fictions, that they are beautiful dreams, or if you will, the dreams of Jupiter himself. I spoke of the Odyssey only to show, that the greatest poets when their genius wants strength and warmth for the pathetic, for the most part employ themselves in painting the manners. Homer has done, in characterising the suitors, and describing their way of life; which is properly a branch of comedy, whose peculiar business it is to represent the manners of men." This We must first observe, it is the sublime of which Longinus is writing: that, and not the nature of Homer's poem, is his subject. After having highly extolled the sublimity and fire of the Iliad, he justly observes the Odyssey to have less of those qualities, and to turn more on the side of moral, and reflections on human life. Nor is it his business here to determine, whether the elevated spirit of the one, or the just moral of the other, be the greater excellence in itself. Secondly, that fire and fury of which he is speaking, cannot well be meant of the general spirit and inspiration which is to run through a whole epic poem, but of that particular warmth and impetuosity necessary in some parts, to image or represent actions or passions, of haste, tumult, and violence. It is on occasion of citing some such particular passages in Homer, that Longinus breaks into this reflection; which seems to determine his meaning chiefly to that sense. Upon the whole, he affirms the Odyssey to have less sublimity and fire than the Iliad; but he does not say it wants the sublime or wants fire. He affirms it to be narrative; but not that the narration is defective. He affirms it to abound in fictions; not that those fictions are ill invented, or ill executed. He affirms it to be nice and particular in painting the manners; but not that those manners are ill painted. If Homer has fully in these points accomplished his own design, and done all that the nature of his poem demanded or allowed, it still remains perfect in its kind, and as much a masterpiece as the Iliad. The amount of the passage is this; that in his own particular taste, and with respect to the sublime, Longinus preferred the Iliad: and because the Odyssey was less active and lofty, he judged it the work of the old age of Homer. If this opinion be true, it will only prove, that Homer's age might determine him in the choice of his subject; not that it affected him in the execution of it: and that which would be a very wrong instance to prove the decay of his imagination, is a very good one to evince the strength of his judgment. For had he (as Madame Dacier observes) composed the Odyssey in his youth, and the Iliad in his age, both must in reason have been exactly the same as they now stand. To blame Homer for his choice of such a subject, as did not admit the same incidents and the same pomp of style as his former, is to take offence at too much variety, and to imagine, that when a man has written one good thing, he must ever after only copy himself. The Battle of Constantine, and the School of Athens, are both pieces of Raphael. Shall we censure the School of Athens as faulty, because it has not the fury and fire of the other? or shall we say, that Raphael was grown grave and old, because he chose to represent the manners of old men and philosophers? There is all the silence, tranquillity, and composure in the one, and all the warmth, hurry, and tumult in the other, which the subject of either required: both of them had been imperfect, if they had not been as they are. And let the painter or poet be young or old, who designs and performs in this manner, it proves him to have made the piece at a time of life when he was master not only of his art, but of his discretion. Aristotle makes no such distinction between the two poems: he constantly cites them with equal praise, and draws the rules and examples of epic writing equally from both. But it is rather to the Odyssey that Horace gives the preference, in the Epistle to Lollius, and in the Art of Poetry. It is remarkable how opposite his opinion is to that of Longinus: and that the particulars he chooses to extol, are those very fictions, and pictures of the manners, which the other seems least to approve. Those fables and manners are of the very essence of the work: but even without that regard, the fables themselves have both more invention and more instruction, and the manners more moral and example, than those of the Iliad. In some points (and those the most essential to the epic poem) the Odyssey is confessed to excel the Iliad, and principally in the great end of it, the moral. The conduct, turn, and disposition of the fable is also what the critics allow to be the better model for epic writers to follow: accordingly we find much more of the cast of this poem than of the other in the Æneid; and (what next to that is perhaps the greatest example) in the Telemachus. In the manners, it is no way inferior: Longinus is so far from finding any defect in these, that he rather taxes Homer with painting them too minutely. As to the narrations, although they are more numerous as the occasions are more frequent, yet they carry no more the marks of old age, and are neither more prolix nor more circumstantial, than the conversations and dialogues of the Iliad. Not to mention the length of those of Phoenix in the ninth book, and of Nestor in the eleventh (which may be thought in compliance to their characters) those of Glaucus in the sixth, of Æneas in the twentieth, and some others, must be allowed to exceed any in the whole Odyssey. And that the propriety of style, and the numbers, in the narrations of each are equal, will appear to any who compare them. To form a right judgment, whether the genius of Homer had suffered any decay, we must consider, in both his poems, such parts as are of a similar nature, and will bear comparison. And it is cer tain we shall find in each, the same vivacity and fecundity of invention, the same life and strength of imaging and colouring, the particular descriptions as highly painted, the figures as bold, the metaphors as animated, and the numbers as harmonious and as various. The Odyssey is a perpetual source of poetry: the stream is not the less full, for being gentle; though it is true (when we speak only with regard to the sublime) that a river, foaming and thundering in cataracts from rocks and precipices, is what more strikes, amazes, and fills the mind, than the same body of water, flowing afterwards through peaceful vales and agreeable scenes of pasturage. The Odyssey (as I have before said) ought to be considered according to its own nature and design not with an eye to the Iliad. To censure Homer because it is unlike what it was never meant to resemble, is, as if a gardener who had purposely cultivated two beautiful trees of contrary natures, as a specimen of his skill in the several kinds, should be blamed for not bringing them into pairs, when in root, stem, leaf, and flower, each was so entirely different, that one must have been spoiled in the endeavour to match the other. 66 Longinus, who saw this poem was partly of the nature of comedy," ought not, for that very reason, to have considered it with a view to the Iliad. How little any such resemblance was the intention of Homer, may appear from hence, that although the character of Ulysses there was already drawn, yet here he purposely turns to another side of it, and shows him, not in that full light of glory, but in the shade of common life, with a mixture of such qualities as are requisite to all the lowest accidents of it, struggling with misfortunes, and on a level with the meanest of mankind. As for the other persons, none of them are above what we call the higher comedy: Calypso, though a goddess, is a character of intrigue; the suitors yet more approaching to it; the Phæacians are of the same cast; the Cyclops, Melanthius, and Irus, descend even to droll characters; and the scenes that appear throughout, are generally of the comic kind; banquets, revels, sports, loves, and the pursuit of a woman. From the nature of the poem, we shall form an idea of the style. The diction is to follow the images, and to take its colour from the complexion of the thoughts. Accordingly the Odyssey is not always clothed in the majesty of verse proper to tragedy; but sometimes descends into the plainer narrative, and sometimes even to that familiar dialogue essential to comedy. However, where it cannot support a sublimity, it always preserves a dignity, or at least a propriety. There is a real beauty in an easy, pure, perspicuous description even of a low action. There are numerous instances of this both in Homer and Virgil: and perhaps those natural passages are not the least pleasing of their works. It is often the same in history, where the representations of common, or even domestic things, in clear, plain, and natural words, are frequently found to make the liveliest impression on the reader. The question is, how far a poet, in pursuing the description or image of an action, can attach himself to little circumstances, without vulgarity or trifling? what particulars are proper, and enliven the image; or what are impertinent, and clog it? |