It is a
language that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. Open
Homer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable language
appears; such lines as:
amphi de naees
smerdaleon konabaesan ausanton hup' Achaion.[6]
That, you might say, is Homer at his ease; when he exerts himself you
get a miracle like:
su den strophalingi koniaes
keiso megas megalosti, lelasmenos hipposunaon.[7]
It seems the art of one who walked through the world of things endowed
with the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort that
looks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience into
incorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre at
milking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The shape and
clamour of waves breaking on the beach in a storm is as irresistibly
recorded by Homer as the gleaming flowers which earth put forth to be
the bed of Zeus and Hera in Gargaros, when a golden cloud was their
coverlet, and Sleep sat on a pine tree near by in the likeness of a
murmuring night-jar. It is an art so balanced, that when it tells us,
with no special emphasis, how the Trojans came on with a din like the
clangour of a flock of cranes, but the Achaians came on in silence, the
temper of the two hosts is discriminated for the whole poem; or, in the
supreme instance, when it tells us how the old men looked at Helen and
said, "No wonder the young men fight for her!" then Helen's beauty must
be accepted by the faith of all the world.
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