Why not have said at once, if that is all you mean, that two
mists met, and one drove the other back? That would have been rational
and intelligible, but not to talk of celestial lances. Homer had no
such misty fancy; he believed the two goddesses were there in true
bodies, with true weapons, on the true earth; and still I ask, what
should Juno have done? Not beaten Diana? No; for it is unlady-like.
Un-English-lady-like, yes; but by no means un-Greek-lady-like, nor
even un-natural-lady-like. If a modern lady does _not_ beat her
servant or her rival about the ears, it is oftener because she is too
weak, or too proud, than because she is of purer mind than Homer's
Juno. She will not strike them; but she will overwork the one or
slander the other without pity; and Homer would not have thought that
one whit more goddess-like than striking them with her open hand.
If, however, the reader likes to suppose that while the two goddesses
in personal presence thus fought with arrow and quiver, there was also
a broader and vaster contest supposed by Homer between the elements
they ruled; and that the goddess of the heavens, as she struck the
goddess of the moon on the flushing cheek, was at the same instant
exercising omnipresent power in the heavens themselves, and gathering
clouds, with which, filled with the moon's own arrows or beams, she
was encumbering and concealing the moon; he is welcome to this out
carrying of the idea, provided that he does not pretend to make it an
interpretation instead of a mere extension, nor think to explain away
my real, running, beautiful beaten Diana, into a moon behind
clouds.
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