Chapter IX: Nature in Hebrew Poetry, and in Homer

The method pursued in this book has been, beginning with some general views, from these to descend to special illustrations, in order to exemplify what has been said of Poetry in a general way, by pointing to the several methods which the poets have actually followed in delineating Nature and her aspects.

It will be but to carry out somewhat more in detail the same procedure if I now adduce a few samples of the way in which some of the greatest poets of each age and country have in their works shown their feeling towards Nature. To exhaust this subject would require a large treatise. A chapter or two is all that can here be afforded to it. In glancing thus, which is all we can do, at a few of the great mountain-summits of song, many a lesser elevation in the long line of poetry, that might well repay attention, must needs be passed in silence. I shall begin with the earliest poets we know, and come down to those near our own time. In such a survey it is to the East that the eye naturally turns, and there especially to the singers of Israel; for, as to the view of Nature which the Hindu Vedas may contain, this is a subject on which I do not venture, since at best I could but repeat at second-hand what others have said.

In considering the views of Nature presented by Hebrew poetry, it is not to the account of the creation in Genesis that we turn, but to the many passages in the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job, in which the aspects of the outward world, as they appeared to those old seers, are delineated. Humboldt and many others have remarked that the description by the Hebrew Poets of the material world everywhere reflects their faith in the unity of God, and in his immediate presence in all creation. The world is described, not so much in detail, but as a whole, in its vast expanses and great movements; or, if individual objects are dwelt on, as in the Book of Job, it is as the visible witnesses to the transcendent power of the Invisible One. Nature is nowhere spoken of as an independent and self-subsistent power, but rather as the outer chamber of an Unseen Presence—a garment, a veil, which the Eternal One is ever ready to break through. These characteristics, which pervade the entire poetry of the Old Testament, are perhaps nowhere seen so condensed as in that crowning hymn of the visible creation, the 104th Psalm.

This Psalm presents, as has often been remarked, a picture of the entire Universe, which for completeness, for breadth, and for grandeur, is unequaled in any other literature. Where else, in human language, shall we find the whole Universe, the heavens and the earth, and the ongoings of man in the midst of them, sketched, as here, in a “few bold strokes”?—

“The Lord covereth himself with light as with a garment. He hath stretched the heavens like a canopy. He laid the foundation of the round world that it should not be removed forever. The waters springing in the mountains descend into the valleys, unto the places which the Lord hath appointed for them, that they may never pass the bounds which He hath set them. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills, to give drink to every beast of the field, for the wild asses to quench their thirst.... Beside them the birds of the air sing among the branches.” The fruits of the field, too, are there; grass and green herb; the labors of man, wine and oil of olive; all the creatures, the conies, the wild goats, the lions roaring after their prey, and seeking their meat from God. There, too, is the great and wide sea, and the wondrous creatures it contains, and the heavenly bodies are rounding in the whole. And then that touching contrast between the moving life of the elements and the quiet yet laborious life of man, encompassed by these vast movements,—“Man goeth forth unto his work and his labor until the evening.” And all this picture of the Universe contained within thirty-five short verses! Besides this, the special Psalm of the visible creation, there is the 65th Psalm, and many another passage in the Psalms, which describe so touchingly the way in which God deals with the earth through natural processes.

Again, I need hardly refer to the Book of Job, especially from the 37th to the 41st chapters, where both single appearances of the world and the arrangement of the whole are depicted in language which has graven itself on the heart of all nations: “The Lord walks on the heights of the sea, on the ridges of the towering waves heaped up by the storm.” Or again: “The morning dawn illumines the border of the earth, and moulds variously the canopy of clouds as the hand of man moulds the ductile clay.”

Or turn again to the great poet-prophet Isaiah. Here you find no detailed descriptions, but all Nature fused and molten before the intense fire, now of his indignation, now of his adoring awe, now of his spiritual joy; one moment lifting his eyes to the midnight heavens as the proof and witness of the Divine Omnipotence; another, in his soul’s exultation over God’s redemptive mercy, calling aloud to the heavens to sing, and the lower parts of the earth to shout for joy, “Break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest and every tree therein.”

But this transport comes from no mere love of Nature. It has a deeper origin. It is for that Jehovah hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted. This is the solemn spiritual joy in which he calls on the heavens and the earth to sympathize.

The following seem to be some of the chief notes of Hebrew poetry in its dealing with Nature:—

1. Nature, as we have seen, is never represented as an independent power or as resplendent with her own beauty, but as the direct creation, one might almost say, the garment of the great Jehovah. In fact it is remarkable that the word Nature, in the sense we now use it in, never occurs in the Bible. Neither the word nor the thing, as a separate entity, seems ever to have been present to the Hebrew mind. In everything they saw or heard God himself as immediately present, ready as it were to rend the veil and manifest himself.

2. The sober, truthful estimate of all things in the external world. They are spoken of exactly as they are. There is no temptation to make too much of them; for He who is behind them and who made them is so much greater, so much more present to thought, that reverence for Him precludes exaggeration. The accuracy of the Bible descriptions of these things is quite unexampled in other literature.[13] This faithfulness to fact, this veneration for natural truth, this feeling that things are too sacred to be exaggerated or distorted, or in any way trifled with, comes directly from the habit of regarding all visible Nature as created and continually upheld by One Omnipresent God. Habitual reverence for Him from whom they come sobers the writers and makes them truthful.

3. Connected with this is the absence of all tendency to theorize or frame hypotheses about Nature’s ongoings. This of course comes from the pervading habit of referring all effects directly to the Divine will; and yet there is no want of philosophic wonder, for, as Humboldt remarks, the Book of Job proposes many questions about natural things “which modern science enables us to propound more formally, and to clothe in more scientific language, but not to solve satisfactorily.” Lastly, there is a deep-hearted pathos, “a yearning pensiveness,” as it has been called, in the Hebrew poetry, over man’s mortal condition, as when in images straight from Nature it describes his life here as “a wind that passeth away and cometh not again,” or “as a flower of the field so he flourisheth, for the wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Simple images, yet how true for all generations!

HOMER.

When we turn from the Hebrew to the Greek poetry, as represented by the father of it, Homer, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. It is not merely that in the regard which the great poet casts on Nature, mythology, a fading and only half-alive mythology, still lingered. It is not this only, but it is that in his thoughts of Nature there is not the same awful reverence, the same profound pathos; but there is more of the artistic sense of beauty, that artistic sense which is only fully developed when the profounder feelings are comparatively laid asleep.

No land known to the ancients, perhaps I might say no land ever known to men, has supplied such visual stimulus to the imagination as Greece;—scenery so richly diversified, a land beyond all others various in features and elements, mountains with their bases plunged into the sea, valleys intersected by great rivers, rich plains and meadows inlaid between the hill-ranges, deeply indented shores, promontories wood-clad or temple-crowned looking out on the many-islanded, Ægean;—around it, on every side, seas so beautiful, above it such a canopy of sky, changing through every hour and every season, and calling forth from sea and land every color which sunlight and gloom can elicit.

If of all nations the Greeks were endowed with the keenest sensibility to beauty, and if Homer was their chief and representative poet, it could hardly be but that scenery so varied should melt into his imagination and reflect itself in his poetry. And so it is. Homer lived most probably on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where he had ever before his eye the island-studded Ægean, behind him the rich valleys opening down to the coast, and eastward the great mountain ranges where these rivers are cradled; could it be that of all this his poetry should give no sign? I cannot agree with Mr. Ruskin’s criticism of the Homeric scenery. You will find it in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” chapter xiii., on Classical Landscape. Like everything which Mr. Ruskin writes, it is interesting and suggestive, but I cannot think it adequate or wholly true. Of the Greeks he says: “They shrank with dread or hatred from all the ruggedness of lower nature—from the wrinkled forest bark and the jagged hill-crest, and irregular inorganic storm of sky, looking to these for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest and health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its gentler beauty.” Again he says: “As far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove.” Again: “It is sufficiently notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the inhabitants of mountainous countries do; but the inhabitants of the plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.”

Now, in this passage, the general assertion seems to be much too sweeping, and, in the special instance of Homer, I think it is not true. Mr. Ruskin backs his position by reference to various passages in the Odyssey which seem to bear him out, but in any fair estimate we must take in the Iliad as well as the Odyssey.

In the Iliad the descriptions of Nature are not so detailed as in the Odyssey. Indeed, they occur almost entirely in similes; but these the poet fetches from every realm and feature of Nature—from the mountain, the forest, the sea, especially as seen darkening under the coming of the western breeze; from the cloudy and the midnight sky; from all kinds of wild animals, the lion, the fawn, the hawk, and the boar. In his battle-scenes it is to all the sterner and fiercer aspects of Nature, and habits of wild beasts, that he has recourse for his comparisons. And would he have so often invoked the aid of these wild forces and creatures of his imagination had not he delighted in them?

So when Teucer slays Mentor, it is thus, as rendered by Lord Derby:—

“Down he fell,
As by the woodman’s axe, on some high peak
Falls a proud ash, conspicuous from afar,
Leveling its tender leaves upon the ground.”

It is thus the charge of Hector is described when he beat back the Greeks and penned them at their ships:—

“On poured the Trojan masses; in the van
Hector straight forward drove in full career.
As some huge bowlder, from its rocky bed
Detached, and by the wintry torrent’s force
Hurled down the steep cliff’s face, when constant rains
The massive rock’s firm hold have undermined;
With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood
Resounds beneath it; still it hurries on,
Until, arriving at the level plain,
Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more.”

Or take another similitude drawn from the sea. When the poet wishes to describe how the Achæan phalanxes come on to battle, this is the image he employs:—

“And as a goatherd from his watch-tower crag
Beholds a cloud advancing o’er the sea
Beneath the west wind’s breath; as from afar
He gazes, black as pitch, it sweeps along
O’er the dark face of ocean, bearing on
A hurricane of rain; he, shuddering, sees
And drives his flock beneath the sheltering cave.
So thick and dark about the Argives stirred,
Impatient for the war, the stalwart youths,
Black masses, bristling close with spear and shield.”

Or again, when, after Agamemnon has retired wounded from the battle, Hector comes forth and slips his Trojans on the Achæan host, as some hunter slips his white-teethed hounds on a wild boar or a lion, and himself

“Fell on their battle, as some roaring storm
Leaps down and heaves the sleeping violet sea.”

One after another he lays low the chiefs, and their names fill three hexameters.

“Of the leaders these
He slew, then on the nameless people fell
As when with hurricane deep the west wind smites
White summer clouds high piled by the clear south,
And volumed wave on wave comes shoreward rolled,
And the white flying foam is scattered high
Before the loud blast of far-wandering wind.”

Let me now give one instance of Homer’s feeling for the aspect of the nightly heavens. It shall be taken from the place of the Iliad where the Trojans, after a day of successful battle, having driven back the Greeks, rest for the night. And here I shall quote, not, as in the above passage, from Lord Derby’s translation, but from a rendering of the passage by the Poet-Laureate. It is the only passage of Homer in which we have the Laureate’s handiwork:—

“So Hector said, and sea-like roared his host,
Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke,
And each beside his chariot bound his own,
And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep
In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine
And bread from out their houses brought, and heaped
Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain
Rolled the rich vapor far into the heaven.
And there all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying, many a fire before them blazed;
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart;
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy.
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And champing golden grain the horses stood
Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn.”

These few samples of the similes scattered thick throughout the Iliad show that Homer laid all the appearances of Nature under contribution, and the wildest and grandest not less than those that are home-like.

True it is that Homer in the Iliad nowhere stops to paint scenery for its own sake. He does this less than Virgil or most later epic poets. He is so full of business and of human action that he cannot stay for description. But in such passages as the Catalogue of the Grecian Host in the second book, there are brief but fine touches of geographical landscape, as he tells of the many lands whence they came; or again in his fixed but most suggestive epithets of places, as “the windy Ilion,” “many-fountained Ida,” and the deep-whirlpooled Scamander; Lacedæmon in the hollow of the hills; Messe, haunt of wild doves; vine-clad Epidaurus; windy Enerpe; Orchomenus rich in flocks.

I would that I could linger over this subject and quote some more passages, such as that where Achilles, long absent, returns to the conflict, and the immortal gods come down to range themselves, some with the Greeks, some on the side of Troy; and heaven and earth, the mountains and the rivers and the sea and the nether world beneath, all are moved to take part in the great issue.

But I must pass on to the scenery of the Odyssey. No doubt this poem contains much more description of landscape than the Iliad, and in that description, as Mr. Ruskin says, there seems to be a preference for the tame and domestic rather than for the wild in Nature. But is there not enough in the subject and circumstance of the two poems to account for such difference? Ulysses, the much-traveled, much-suffering man, who had endured so many things by land and sea, his home-sick heart is yearning for his native Ithaca. That his heart should be weary of the sea and the mountains and all wild untractable things is only too natural. It is quite in keeping with and as a set-off against this feeling of home-weariness that the poet, in describing such a wanderer, should dwell with peculiar emphasis on all that is warm and comfortable and home-like in scenery.

Let me give one or two samples from Worsley’s translation of the Odyssey, which I am disposed to think is the best poetic translation of any classical poet that we have in English. Mr. Worsley rendered the hexameters of Homer into the Spenserian stanza, and he so perfectly caught the whole rhythm and cadence of Spenser, and this answers so well to the spirit of the Odyssey, the most romantic of Greek poems, that I know no more delightful reading than those picturesque and melodious stanzas.

Here is one sample. Ulysses, having left Calypso’s island on a raft, is shipwrecked in mid-seas, and this is the description of his coming to land on the island of Phæacia:—

“Two nights and days in the tumultuous swell
He wandered. Often did his heart forebode
Utter extinction in the yawning hell,
But when the fair-haired Dawn arising glowed,
And in the eastern heaven the thin light showed,
Came a calm-deepening day, windless and clear.
Then when Odysseus on a tall wave rode,
And his keen eyes along the heaving mere
Stretched in extreme desire, he saw the land rise near.

“As when a father, on the point to die,
Who for long time in sore disease hath lain,
By the strong Fates tormented heavily,
Till the pulse faileth for exceeding pain,
Feels the life stirring in his bones again;
While glad at heart his children smile around,
He also smiles—the gods have loosed his chain;
So welcome seemed the land with forest crowned,
And he rejoicing swam, and yearned to feel the ground.

“But now within a voice-throw of the rocks
The sound of waters did his ears appall.
Full on the coast the great waves’ thunder-shocks
Roll, and afar the wet foam-vapors fall.
No roadstead there, no haven seemed at all,
Nor shelter where a ship might rest at ease;
But from the main-earth darted a wild wall
Of headlands. Then Odysseus’ heart and knees
Were loosened; and his soul thus spake in the deep seas.”

Then follows a fine description of his struggle with the breakers, and how his flesh was torn and his skin peeled against the sharp rocks:—

“He from the echoing breakers swam right fain,
Skirting the coast; if chance his eyes explore
Or far or near some haven of the main,
Or mild declivity of shelving shore.
But when he came the river-month before,
And his gaze rested on the long white gleam,
By rocks unchafed and windless evermore,
Here to his thought best landing-place did seem,
And in his soul he prayed, feeling the calm sweet stream.”

Then the landing and climbing up into the wood, and hiding himself under a mound of gathered leaves:—

“Where o’er his weary head,
Athene all night long pain-healing slumber shed.”

But I recommend every one to read the last hundred lines of the fifth book of the Odyssey. It is one of the most natural and beautiful descriptions of sea-coast scenery, heightened in its interest by the presence of man in strife with the waters, that is to be found in any poet.

The whole of this passage is commented on by Mr. Ruskin at length, but I think his comments are one-sided and overdone. No doubt the shipwrecked man kisses the corn-growing land when at last he reaches it, and gladly covers himself with the dead leaves. But it is not, as Mr. Ruskin says, that the Greek mind shrank from wild things, and took pleasure only in things subservient to human use. It is because it was the action natural to a shipwrecked man just escaped from the hateful sea to hug the land he had so much toil to reach; and it was natural for a poet, when describing his hero tossed and drenched for days amid the hungry foam, to bring out in strong contrast all the warmth and comfort of the dry cheerful earth.[14]

One sample of Homer’s home-painting must be given, where we see—

“All things are in order stored—
A home of ancient peace;”—

“Outside the court-yard stretched a planted space
Of orchard, and a fence environed all the place.

“There, in full prime, the orchard-trees grew tall,
Sweet-fig, pomegranate, apple fruited fair,
Pear and the healthful olive. Each and all
Both summer droughts and chills of winter spare.
All the year round they flourish. Some the air
Of zephyr warms to life, some doth mature,
Apple grows old on apple, pear on pear,
Fig follows fig, vintage doth vintage lure;
Thus the rich revolution doth for age endure.

“With well-sunned floor for drying, there is seen
The vineyard. Here the grapes they cull, there tread.
Here falls the blossom from the clusters green,
There the first blushings by the suns are shed.
Last, flowers forever fadeless, bed by bed;
Two streams: one waters the whole garden fair;
One through the court-yard, near the house is led,
Whereto with pitcher all the folk repair.
All these the God-sent gifts to King Alcinous were.”

I might go on to quote the description of Calypso’s cave, and many another landscape with which this Greek romance abounds. Indeed, it would take a summer day to exhaust the passages descriptive of Nature in the Odyssey and the Iliad alone, before we could arrive at an adequate idea of the Homeric view of Nature. This only I will say and pass on—that in the Odyssey you do find that the scenes most lovingly depicted are home scenes of order, comfort, and repose. But this is not because, as Mr. Ruskin says, the Greek mind abhorred the wildness of nature, but because, with such a character to describe as Ulysses, battered by the strokes of doom, travel-weary and home-sick, the natural framework to such a human figure, that which gives at once contrast and relief, is a setting taken from the reposeful side of Nature. Of storm and trouble you have had enough in the human character. Nature here must furnish the background of repose. But in the Iliad, if we look at the similes, we find them taken from every form and aspect of Nature—the wild and vast as well as the homely and the minute. The poet gathers images from every element, earth, sky, and sea, mountain and meadow; but all are used, not for their own sakes, not to dwell on themselves alone, but to bring out by similitude the force of the human passions and actions, which are the substance of the epic. But the poet who could so use Nature, making her a storehouse of images whence he drew at will, must have lived familiarly in the eye of Nature, loving her in all her aspects with a true though unconscious love.