Methley recovered almost suddenly, and we determined1 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 lore2 as to impress it with something of an original and barbarous character — with an almost Gothic quaintness3, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad4 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, lugged5 in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding6 in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim7 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 tact8 than is usually shown by people so learned as he.
I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar’s love. The most humble9 and pious10 among women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her firstborn son no Watts’ hymns11, 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 mesh12 like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer’s battles.
I pored over the Odyssey13 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 reverence14 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 strife15 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 dissertation16 printed in type still more majestic17 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 forth19, I know not how quaintly20, 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 folly21 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 assented22 with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to know Homer. A learned commentator23 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 impending24 gods; how profanely26 he exults27 over the powers divine when they are taught to dread28 the prowess of mortals! and most of all, how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of the Sixth Book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors29 and masters how best to admire it. The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex30 him with their delays, and their talking; the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the nodding plume31 of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes32 at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical33 light of Homer’s poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the Iliad, that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother’s shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never remitting34 his fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow — the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel when the noblest of all his foes35 lies sadly dying at the Scaean gate.
Heroic days are these, but the dark ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it is all right in the end, yet, by Jove, at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your mother’s dressing-room to a buzzing school. You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere36 names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty37 rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend38 their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space; you vex the electric cylinder39 till it yields you, for your toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the men who have saved whole empires from oblivion. What more will you ever learn? Yet the dismal40 change is ordained41, and then, thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds42 and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall43 over all your early lore. Instead of sweet knowledge, vile44, monkish45, doggerel46 grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons47, and horrible odds48 and ends of dead languages, are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap49 of “Scriptores Romani,” — from Greek poetry down, down to the cold rations50 of “Poetae Graeci,” cut up by commentators51, and served out by schoolmasters!
It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend forward so longingly52 to the plains of Troy.
Away from our people and our horses, Methley and I went loitering along by the willow53 banks of a stream that crept in quietness through the low, even plain. There was no stir of weather overhead, no sound of rural labour, no sign of life in the land; but all the earth was dead and still, as though it had lain for thrice a thousand years under the leaden gloom of one unbroken Sabbath.
Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding54 and winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew that the springs which fed it were high on Ida — the springs of Simois and Scamander!
It was coldly and thanklessly, and with vacant, unsatisfied eyes that I watched the slow coming and the gliding55 away of the waters. I tell myself now, as a profane25 fact, that I did stand by that river (Methley gathered some seeds from the bushes that grew there), but since that I am away from his banks, “divine Scamander” has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen deity56; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far antiquity57, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One’s mind regains58 in absence that dominion59 over earthly things which has been shaken by their rude contact. You force yourself hardily60 into the material presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected rapture61 are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this load of real earth and water; but let these once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology62.
It is not over the plain before Troy that the river now flows; its waters have edged away far towards the north, since the day that “divine Scamander” (whom the gods call Xanthus) went down to do battle for Ilion, “with Mars, and Phoebus, and Latona, and Diana glorying in her arrows, and Venus the lover of smiles.”
And now, when I was vexed63 at the migration64 of Scamander, and the total loss or absorption of poor dear Simois, how happily Methley reminded me that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes! The Greeks in beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due to the gods, and so after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow from Ida and sent them flooding over the wall, till all the beach was smooth and free from the unhallowed works of the Greeks. It is true I see now, on looking to the passage, that Neptune65, when the work of destruction was done, turned back the rivers to their ancient ways:
“ . . . [Greek verse],”
but their old channels passing through that light pervious soil would have been lost in the nine days’ flood, and perhaps the god, when he willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient beds, may have done his work but ill: it is easier, they say, to destroy than it is to restore.
We took to our horses again, and went southward towards the very plain between Troy and the tents of the Greeks, but we rode by a line at some distance from the shore. Whether it was that the lay of the ground hindered my view towards the sea, or that I was all intent upon Ida, or whether my mind was in vacancy66, or whether, as is most like, I had strayed from the Dardan plains all back to gentle England, there is now no knowing, nor caring, but it was not quite suddenly indeed, but rather, as it were, in the swelling67 and falling of a single wave, that the reality of that very sea-view, which had bounded the sight of the Greeks, now visibly acceded68 to me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive how deeply that eternal coast-line, that fixed69 horizon, those island rocks, must have graven their images upon the minds of the Grecian warriors70 by the time that they had reached the ninth year of the siege! conceive the strength, and the fanciful beauty, of the speeches with which a whole army of imagining men must have told their weariness, and how the sauntering chiefs must have whelmed that daily, daily scene with their deep Ionian curses!
And now it was that my eyes were greeted with a delightful71 surprise. Whilst we were at Constantinople, Methley and I had pored over the map together. We agreed that whatever may have been the exact site of Troy, the Grecian camp must have been nearly opposite to the space betwixt the islands of Imbros and Tenedos,
“[Greek verse],”
but Methley reminded me of a passage in the Iliad in which Neptune is represented as looking at the scene of action before Ilion from above the island of Samothrace. Now Samothrace, according to the map, appeared to be not only out of all seeing distance from the Troad, but to be entirely72 shut out from it by the intervening Imbros, which is a larger island, stretching its length right athwart the line of sight from Samothrace to Troy. Piously73 allowing that the dread Commoter of our globe might have seen all mortal doings, even from the depth of his own cerulean kingdom, I still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see the fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse74 from all haziness75 and overreaching, would have MEANT to give the god for his station some spot within reach of men’s eyes from the plains of Troy. I think that this testing of the poet’s words by map and compass may have shaken a little of my faith in the completeness of his knowledge. Well, now I had come; there to the south was Tenedos, and here at my side was Imbros, all right, and according to the map, but aloft over Imbros, aloft in a far-away heaven, was Samothrace, the watch-tower of Neptune!
So Homer had appointed it, and so it was; the map was correct enough, but could not, like Homer, convey THE WHOLE TRUTH. Thus vain and false are the mere human surmises76 and doubts which clash with Homeric writ18!
Nobody whose mind had not been reduced to the most deplorable logical condition could look upon this beautiful congruity77 betwixt the Iliad and the material world and yet bear to suppose that the poet may have learned the features of the coast from mere hearsay78; now then, I believed; now I knew that Homer had PASSED ALONG HERE, that this vision of Samothrace over-towering the nearer island was common to him and to me.
After a journey of some few days by the route of Adramiti and Pergamo we reached Smyrna. The letters which Methley here received obliged him to return to England.
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1
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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lore
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| n.传说；学问，经验，知识 | |
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quaintness
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| n.离奇有趣，古怪的事物 | |
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ballad
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| n.歌谣，民谣，流行爱情歌曲 | |
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lugged
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| vt.用力拖拉（lug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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abounding
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| adj.丰富的，大量的v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的现在分词 ) | |
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whim
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| n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想 | |
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tact
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| n.机敏，圆滑，得体 | |
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humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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hymns
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌( hymn的名词复数 ) | |
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mesh
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| n.网孔，网丝，陷阱；vt.以网捕捉，啮合，匹配；vi.适合； [计算机]网络 | |
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odyssey
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| n.长途冒险旅行；一连串的冒险 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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strife
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| n.争吵，冲突，倾轧，竞争 | |
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dissertation
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| n.（博士学位）论文，学术演讲，专题论文 | |
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majestic
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| adj.雄伟的，壮丽的，庄严的，威严的，崇高的 | |
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writ
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| n.命令状，书面命令 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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quaintly
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| adv.古怪离奇地 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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assented
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| 同意，赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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commentator
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| n.注释者，解说者；实况广播评论员 | |
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impending
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| a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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profane
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| adj.亵神的，亵渎的；vt.亵渎，玷污 | |
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profanely
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| adv.渎神地，凡俗地 | |
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exults
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| 狂喜，欢跃( exult的第三人称单数 ) | |
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dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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pastors
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| n.（基督教的）牧师( pastor的名词复数 ) | |
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vex
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| vt.使烦恼，使苦恼 | |
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plume
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| n.羽毛；v.整理羽毛，骚首弄姿，用羽毛装饰 | |
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32
chafes
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| v.擦热（尤指皮肤）( chafe的第三人称单数 )；擦痛；发怒；惹怒 | |
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33
vertical
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| adj.垂直的，顶点的，纵向的；n.垂直物，垂直的位置 | |
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remitting
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| v.免除（债务），宽恕( remit的现在分词 )；使某事缓和；寄回，传送 | |
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foes
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| 敌人，仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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transcend
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| vt.超出，超越(理性等)的范围 | |
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cylinder
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| n.圆筒，柱(面)，汽缸 | |
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dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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ordained
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| v.任命（某人）为牧师( ordain的过去式和过去分词 )；授予（某人）圣职；（上帝、法律等）命令；判定 | |
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shreds
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| v.撕碎，切碎( shred的第三人称单数 )；用撕毁机撕毁（文件） | |
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pall
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| v.覆盖，使平淡无味；n.柩衣，棺罩；棺材；帷幕 | |
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44
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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monkish
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| adj.僧侣的，修道士的，禁欲的 | |
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doggerel
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| n.拙劣的诗，打油诗 | |
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47
lexicons
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| n.词典( lexicon的名词复数 )；专门词汇 | |
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odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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rations
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| 定量( ration的名词复数 )； 配给量； 正常量； 合理的量 | |
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commentators
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| n.评论员( commentator的名词复数 )；时事评论员；注释者；实况广播员 | |
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52
longingly
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| adv. 渴望地 热望地 | |
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53
willow
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| n.柳树 | |
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winding
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| n.绕，缠，绕组，线圈 | |
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gliding
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| v. 滑翔 adj. 滑动的 | |
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56
deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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58
regains
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| 复得( regain的第三人称单数 )； 赢回； 重回； 复至某地 | |
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dominion
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| n.统治，管辖，支配权；领土，版图 | |
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hardily
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| 耐劳地，大胆地，蛮勇地 | |
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rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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mythology
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| n.神话，神话学，神话集 | |
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vexed
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| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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migration
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| n.迁移，移居，（鸟类等的）迁徙 | |
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Neptune
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| n.海王星 | |
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vacancy
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| n.（旅馆的）空位，空房，（职务的）空缺 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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acceded
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| v.（正式）加入( accede的过去式和过去分词 )；答应；（通过财产的添附而）增加；开始任职 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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warriors
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| 武士，勇士，战士( warrior的名词复数 ) | |
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71
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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72
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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piously
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| adv.虔诚地 | |
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averse
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| adj.厌恶的；反对的，不乐意的 | |
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haziness
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| 有薄雾，模糊； 朦胧之性质或状态； 零能见度 | |
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surmises
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| v.臆测，推断( surmise的第三人称单数 )；揣测；猜想 | |
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congruity
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| n.全等，一致 | |
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hearsay
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| n.谣传，风闻 | |
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