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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

K >> Kenneth Morris >> The Crest Wave of Evolution




And the Odyssey? Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his
old age. Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and
many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and
there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all. Someone
says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than
from that of Homer. I do not know. It is a better story than
the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind. Yet
it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are
discrepant and incompatible parts.

There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed
down unwritten for several centuries. Well; I can imagine the
Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the
verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so
preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But
I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to
imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me
Homer must have written or dictated them at first. Writing in
Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times. It is
now, anywhere, to illiterates. In Caesar's day, as he tells us,
it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but
the people did not. It seems probable that writing was not in
general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me,
certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services
to those who did. But there was writing in Crete long before the
Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the
first Egyptian Dynasties, for example. And here is a point to
remember: alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost
and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of
writing. Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since
Lemurian days. When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a
poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine
Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he
chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.

Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer? What
can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the
picture I have attempted to make? Very little; yet perhaps
something. I think his historical importance is greater, for us
now, than his literary importance. I doubt you shall find in him
as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the
hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example. I doubt he was
an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious
mind the truths that make men free. Plato did not altogether
approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not
fear to follow. I think the great Master-Poets of the world have
been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they
presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul. I believe
that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that
therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated. He
pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation: his fame is
chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and
use their hats for speaking-trumpets. We have in English no
approximately decent translation of him. Someone said that Pope
served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince
was moved to cry: "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!"
It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful
and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in
intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true
respect. Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of
Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would
loathe Homer. Pope held that water should manifest, so to say,
through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to
be from the Kitchen-tap--or even from the sewer. Homer was more
familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the
yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands. Which
pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous
sea-epithet: the thunder-on-the-precipices of

_poluphloisboio thalasses,_

or the lisping-on-the-sands of

_ poluphleesbeeo thalassace?_

(pardon the attempted phonetics).--For truly there are advocates
of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to
Mr. Pope.

As to his style, his manner or movement: to summarize what
Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct
and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but
noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque
periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but
he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly,
clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation
often by long similes.) And he either made a language for
himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous
as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in
you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the
pronunciation. But give the vowels merely a plain English value,
certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music. Perhaps
some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay _On Translating
Homer,_ and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.
A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom
Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels--to some effect. Newman
had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that
it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.
There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman's
side. Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary
virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to
certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity,
designate imperfections: therein following De Quincey, who read
Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a
critic, saw things sometimes. _Bonus dormitat Homerus,_ says
Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked." He was
the product of a great creative force; which did not however
work in a great literary age: and all I am going to say is
merely a bearing out of this.

First there is his poverty of epithets. He repeats the same ones
over and over again. He can hardly mention Hector without
calling him _megas koruthaiolos Hector,_--"great glittering-
helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) _Hectoros hippodamoio_--
"of Hector the tamer of war-steeds." Over and over again we have
_anax andron Agamemnon;_ or "swift-footed Achilles." Over and
over again is the sea _poluphloisbois-terous,_ as if he could say
nothing new about it. Having discovered one resounding phrase
that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just
content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his
imagination as to flash some new revelation on it. As if Hamlet
should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet
as "the hesitating Dane."...... But think how the Myriad-minded
One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up
new revelatory figures and epithets about everything: how he
could not afford to repeat himself, because there were not enough
hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human
lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous
burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but
pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour
you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have
said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it
all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to
Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer,
with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.

Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you
a resounding glory. What means this most familiar one, think you:

_Ten d'apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?_

--Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed? But
no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted
Hector;" or _tout simplement,_ 'Hector answered.' And hardly can
anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some
variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums:

_Ton d'emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon.
Hos phato. Ten d'outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus_

--whereafter at seven lines down we get again:

_Ten de meg' ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;_

--in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and
unskill. It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no
adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators,
whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear. But you will
remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has
fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme
thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest
over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always
some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So
he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and
so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's--would
still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel-
values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the
Soul and the Eternal.

Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly. If it is true
that his reputation gains on the principle of _Omne ignotum pro
magnifico_--because he is unknown to most that praise him--let
none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry. His
faults--to call them that--are such as you would expect from his
age, race, and peculiar historic position; his virtues are
drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from
the Unfathomable that flowed through him. He had the high
serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them
highly, deeply and seriously. We may compare him to Dante: who
also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with
a huge racial inspiration. But Dante had something more: a
purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul.
Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as "the most important
poetical monument existing." Well; cultured Tom, Dick and Harry
would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say.
But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a
less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante,
Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe--to name only poets
of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul-
symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.

Here, to me, is another sign of primitivism. If there is paucity
of imagination in his epithets, there is none whatever in his
surgery. I do not know to what figure the casualty list in the
Iliad amounts; but believe no wound or death of them all was
dealt in the same bodily part or in the same way. Now Poetry
essentially turns from these physical details; her preoccupations
are with the Soul.

"From Homer and Polygnotus," says Goethe, "I daily learn more
and more that in our life here above the ground we have, properly
speaking, to enact Hell." A truth, so far as it goes: this
Earth is hell; there is no hell, says H.P. Blavatsky, but a man-
bearing planet. But we demand of the greatest, that they shall
see beyond hell into Heaven. Homer achieves his grandeur
oftenest through swift glimpses of the pangs and tragedy of human
fate; and I do not think he saw through the gloom to the
bright Reality. Watching the Greek host from the walls of Troy,
Helen says:

"Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain whom I see not among the commanders,
Castor, fleet in the car, Polydeukes, brave with the cestus--
Own dear brethren of mine,--one parent loved us as infants.
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved
Lacedaimon?
Or, though they came with the rest in the ships that bound
through the waters,
Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?"

And then:

_Hos phato. Tous d'ede kalechen phusizoos aia,
En Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie._

"--So spake she; but they long since under Earth were
reposing
There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaimon."

[From Dr. Hawtrey's translation, quoted by
Matthew Arnold in _On Translating Homer._]

There it is the sudden antithesis from her gentle womanly inquiry
about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that
strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner. Then there
is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos:

"Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know
the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness
known to mortals was granted them: the one on the mountain,
the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded
Muses sing."

You hear the high pride and pathos in that. To be a poet, he
says: to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing: is the highest
happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the
Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he
acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not
the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace
happiness of feeling secure against dark fate. It is the same
feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the
early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the
swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand
manner. The pride is lacking quite: the intuition for a
divinity within man. But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and
pet-hood against the sorrow of fate: even though he finds the
sorrow weighs it down. Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said: "It
is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have
many recompenses." How different the note of Milton:

"Those other two, equal with me in fate,
So were I equal with them in renown--"

or:

"Unchanged, though fallen on evil days;
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and by dangers compassed round."

And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have anticipated the blows
of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been
astonished at fate's presumption.

We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:

_Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai_--

"Thou to, we hear, old man, e'en thou was at once time happy;"

_Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin
Zoein achnumenous. Autoi de l'akedees eisin_--

"The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful,
Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."

Proud--no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense;
there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty
resignation. As if he said: We are miserable; there is nothing
else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss
about.--It is the restraint--a very Greek quality--the depth
hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all--that make in
these cases his grand manner. His attitude is, I think, nearer
the Teutonic than the Celtic:--his countrymen, like the Teutons,
were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night. But he
and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did
not. His eyes, like Llywarch's or Oisin's, were fixed on a past
glory beyond the nightfall.

But where does this Homeric mood lead us? To no height of truth,
I think. Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature
of the future and the grandest things it should utter,--for the
life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be
Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the
Soul--when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is
Joy." Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the
veil that hides it. God knows we see enough of the veil; but
the poet's business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show
the brightness which it hides. If the personality were all, and
a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave;
then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in
all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses
of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as
something unknowable, adverse and aloof. But the Greater Part of
a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little
incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is
understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur
the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon
its true path and mission.

I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad: the passion and
spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough
to let him see this outward world: personalities, with their
motive-springs of action within themselves: his greatness, his
sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he
lacked vision for the Meanings. I found him then less than
Shakespeare: whose clear knowledge of human personalities--
ability to draw living men--was but incidental and an instrument;
who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set
forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma,
and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the
triumph of the soul, the Magician, in _The Tempest._ And I count
him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to
justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of
fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the
Celtic bards, that in the very depths of hell the Soul has not
yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior
to hell, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;--I count
him less than the "Evening Dragon" of _Samson Agonistes,_ whose
last word to us is

"Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt."

And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose
words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his
journey

.... _pei dolci pomi
Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
Ma fino al centro pria convien ch'io tomi:_--

"to obtain those sweet apples (of Paradise) promised me by my
true Leader; but first is"--convien--how shall you translate the
pride and resignation of that word?--"it behoves," we must say,
"it convenes"--"first it is convenient that I should fall as far
as to the center (of hell);"--who must end the gloom and terror
of that journey, that fall, with

_E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,_

"And then we came forth to behold again the Stars;" and who came
from his ascent through purifying Purgatory with

_Rifatto si, come piante novelle
Rinnovellate di novella fronda,
Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle_--

"So made anew, like young plants in spring with fresh foliage, I
was pure and disposed to come forth among the Stars;"--and who
must end his _Paradiso_ and his life-work announcing

_L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle,_

"The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars." Ah, glory
to this Dante! Glory to the man who would end nothing but
with the stars!




III. GREEKS AND PERSIANS


Now to consider what this Blind Maeonides did for Greece.
Sometime last Century a Black Potentate from Africa visited
England, and was duly amazed at all he saw. Being a very
important person indeed, he was invited to pay his respects to
Queen Victoria. he told her of the many wonders he had seen;
and took occasion to ask her, as the supreme authority, how such
things came to be. What was the secret of England's greatness?
--She rose to it magnificently, and did precisely what a large
section of her subjects would have expected of her. She solemnly
handed him a copy of the Bible, and told him he should find his
answer in that.

She was thinking, no doubt, of the influence of Christian
teaching; if called on for the exact passage that had worked the
wonder, very likely she would have turned to the Sermon on the
Mount. Well; very few empires have founded their material
greatness on such texts, as _The meek shall inherit the earth._
They take a shorter road to it. If a man ask of thee thy coat,
and thou give him thy cloak also, thou dost not (generally) build
thyself a world-wide commerce. When he smiteth thee on they left
cheek, and thou turnest to him thy right for the complementary
buffet, thou dost not (as a rule) become shortly possessed of his
territories. Queen Victoria lived in an age when people did not
notice these little discrepancies; so did Mr. Podsnap. And yet
there was much more truth in her answer than you might think.

King James's Bible is a monument of mighty literary style; and
one that generations of Englishmen have regarded as divine, a
message from the Ruler of the Stars. They have been reading it,
and hearing it read in the churches, for three hundred years.
Its language has been far more familiar to them than that of any
other book whatsoever; more common quotations come from it,
probably, than from all other sources combined. The Puritans
of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified
themselves with the folk it tells about: Cromwell's armies saw
in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of
Gideon." When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the
Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command
of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite
Amalek hip and thigh." Phrases from the Old Testament are in the
mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases couched in the
grand literary style.

Now the grand style is the breathing of a sense of greatness.
When it occurs you sense a mysterious importance lurking behind
the words. It is the accent of the eternal thing in man, the
Soul; and one of the many proofs of the Soul's existence. So
you cannot help being reminded by it of the greatness of the
soul. There are periods when the soul draws near its racial
vehicle, and the veils grow thin between it and us: through all
the utterances of such times one is apt to hear the thunder from
beyond. Although the soul have no word to say, or although it
message suffer change in passing through the brain-mind, so that
not high truth, but even a lie may emerge--it still comes, often,
ringing with the grand accents. Such a period was that which
gave us Shakespeare and Milton, and the Bible, and Brown, and
Taylor, and all the mighty masters of English prose. Even when
their thought is trivial or worse, you are reminded, by the march
and mere order of their words, of the majesty of the Soul.

When Deborah sings of that treacherous murderess, Jael the wife
of Heber the Kenite, that before she slew her guest and ally
Sisera, "He asked water and she gave him milk; she brought
forth butter in a lordly dish,"--you are aware that, to the
singer, no question of ethics was implied. Nothing common,
nothing of this human daily world, inheres in it; but sacrosanct
destinies were involved, and the martialed might of the Invisible.
It was part of a tremendous drama, in which Omnipotence itself
was protagonist. Little Israel rose against the mighty of
this world; but the Unseen is mightier than the mighty; and
the Unseen was with little Israel. The application is false,
unethical, abominable--as coming through brain-minds of that
kind. But you must go back behind the application, behind
the brain-mind, to find the secret of the air of greatness that
pervades it. It is a far-off reflection of this eternal truth:
that the Soul, thought it speak through but one human being, can
turn the destinies and overturn the arrogance of the world. When
David sang, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered;
yea, let all his enemies be scattered!" he, poor brain-mind, was
thinking of his triumphs over Philistines and the like; with
whom he had better have been finding a way to peace;--but the
Soul behind him was thinking of its victories over him and his
passions and his treacheries. So such psalms and stories,
though their substance be vile enough, do by their language
yet remind us somehow of the grandeur of the Spirit. That
is what style achieves.

Undoubtedly this grand language of the Bible, as that of Milton
and Shakespeare in a lesser degree--lesser in proportion as they
have been less read--has fed in the English race an aptitude, an
instinct, for action on a large imperial scale. It is not easy
to explain the effect of great literature; but without doubt it
molds the race. Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral
import, is very mixed. There is much that is true and beautiful;
much that is treacherous and savage. So that its moral and
ethical effects have been very mixed too. But its style, a
subtler thing than ethics, has nourished conceptions of a large
and seeping sort, to play through what ethical ideas they might
find. The more spiritual is any influence--that is, the less
visible and easy to trace--the more potent it is; so style in
literature may be counted one of the most potent forces of all.
Through it, great creative minds mold the destinies of nations.
Let Theosophy have expression as noble as that of the Bible--as
it will--and of that very impulse it will bite deep into the
subconsciousness of the race, and be the nourishment of grand
public action, immense conceptions, greater than any that have
come of Bible reading, because pure and true. Our work is to
purify the channels through which the Soul shall speak; the
Teachers have devoted themselves to establishing the beginnings
of this Movement in right thought and right life. But the great
literary impulse will come, when we have learned and earned the
right to use it.

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