Methley recovered almost suddenly, and we determined to go through
the Troad together.
My comrade was a capital Grecian. It is true that his singular
mind so ordered and disposed his classic lore as to impress it with
something of an original and barbarous character - with an almost
Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad
than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in
his knowing so much Greek - an unfitness in the idea of marble
fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in under the
oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But
Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all
truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal of the
practical sagacity
"Of a Yorkshireman hippodamoio,"
and this enabled him to apply his knowledge with much more tact
than is usually shown by people so learned as he.
I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most
humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she
could teach her firstborn son no Watts' hymns, no collects for the
day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less than this,
to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that
old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously
rendered into English, the English of Pope even, but not even a
mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer's
battles.
I pored over the Odyssey as over a story-book, hoping and fearing
for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the Iliad - line by
line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love.
As an old woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of
the world to come, so, as though it would fit me for the coming
strife of this temporal world, I read and read the Iliad. Even
outwardly, it was not like other books; it was throned in towering
folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still
more majestic than the rest of the book; this I read, but not till
my enthusiasm for the Iliad had already run high. The writer
compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients,
set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all
to the human race - that it was history, poetry, revelation; that
the works of men's hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away
like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would
endure for ever and ever.
I assented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to
know Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks,
in the same sense as an oil-and-colour man may be said to know
something of painting; but take an untamed child, and leave him
alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will
be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit of old Greece; HE does
not stop in the ninth year of the siege to admire this or that
group of words; HE has no books in his tent, but he shares in vital
counsels with the "king of men," and knows the inmost souls of the
impending gods; how profanely he exults over the powers divine when
they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals!
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