Hypatia - Charles Kingsley (best books to read for students txt) 📗

brought here Among his other spoils; yet set her free Again, receiving ransom rich and great. But Artemis, whose bow is all her joy, Smote her to death within her father’s halls. Hector! so thou art father to me now, Mother, and brother, and husband fair and strong! Oh, come now, pity me, and stay thou here Upon the tower, nor make thy child an orphan And me thy wife a widow; range the men Here by the fig-tree, where the city lies Lowest, and where the wall can well be scaled; For here three times the best have tried the assault Round either Ajax, and Idomeneus, And round the Atridai both, and Tydeus’ son, Whether some cunning seer taught them craft, Or their own spirit stirred and drove them on.’ Then spake tall Hector, with the glancing helm All this I too have watched, my wife; yet much I hold in dread the scorn of Trojan men And Trojan women with their trailing shawls, If, like a coward, I should skulk from war. Beside, I have no lust to stay; I have learnt Aye to be bold, and lead the van of fight, To win my father, and myself, a name. For well I know, at heart and in my thought, The day will come when Ilios the holy Shall lie in heaps, and Priam, and the folk Of ashen-speared Priam, perish all. But yet no woe to come to Trojan men, Nor even to Hecabe, nor Priam king, Nor to my brothers, who shall roll in dust, Many and fair, beneath the strokes of foes, So moves me, as doth thine, when thou shalt go Weeping, led off by some brass-harnessed Greek, Robbed of the daylight of thy liberty, To weave in Argos at another’s loom, Or bear the water of Messeis home, Or Hypereia, with unseemly toils, While heavy doom constrains thee, and perchance The folk may say, who see thy tears run down, “This was the wife of Hector, best in fight At Ilium, of horse-taming Trojan men.” So will they say perchance; while unto thee Now grief will come, for such a husband’s loss, Who might have warded off the day of thrall. But may the soil be heaped above my corpse Before I hear thy shriek and see thy shame!’ He spoke, and stretched his arms to take the child, But back the child upon his nurse’s breast Shrank crying, frightened at his father’s looks. Fearing the brass and crest of horse’s hair Which waved above the helmet terribly. Then out that father dear and mother laughed, And glorious Hector took the helmet off, And laid it gleaming on the ground, and kissed His darling child, and danced him in his arm; And spoke in prayer to Zeus, and all the gods ‘Zeu, and ye other gods, oh grant that this My child, like me, may grow the champion here As good in strength, and rule with might in Troy That men may say, “The boy is better far Than was his sire,” when he returns from war, Bearing a gory harness, having slain A foeman, and his mothers heart rejoice. Thus saying, on the hands of his dear wife He laid the child; and she received him back In fragrant bosom, smiling through her tears.

[Footnote: The above lines are not meant as a ‘translation,’ but as an humble attempt to give the literal sense in some sort of metre. It would be an act of arrogance even to aim at success where Pope and Chapman failed. It is simply, I believe, impossible to render Homer into English verse; because, for one reason among many, it is impossible to preserve the pomp of sound, which invests with grandeur his most common words. How can any skill represent the rhythm of Homeric Greek in a language which—to take the first verse which comes to hand—transforms ‘boos megaloio boeien,’ into ‘great ox’s hide’?]

‘Such is the myth. Do you fancy that in it Homer meant to hand down to the admiration of ages such earthly commonplaces as a mother’s brute affection, and the terrors of an infant? Surely the deeper insight of the philosopher may be allowed without the reproach of fancifulness, to see in it the adumbration of some deeper mystery!

‘The elect soul, for instance—is not its name Astyanax, king of the city; by the fact of its ethereal parentage, the leader and lord of all around it, though it knows it not? A child as yet, it lies upon the fragrant bosom of its mother Nature, the nurse and yet the enemy of man—Andromache, as the poet well names her, because she fights with that being, when grown to man’s estate, whom as a child she nourished. Fair is she, yet unwise; pampering us, after the fashion of mothers, with weak indulgences; fearing to send us forth into the great realities of speculation, there to forget her in the pursuit of glory, she would have us while away our prime within the harem, and play for ever round her knees. And has not the elect soul a father, too, whom it knows not? Hector, he who is without— unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its husband?—the all- pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether the fire, Osiris the lifegiver; whom here the poet has set forth as the defender of the mystic city, the defender of harmony, and order, and beauty throughout the universe? Apart sits his great father—Priam, the first of existences, father of many sons, the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without predicate, unnameable.

‘From It and for It the universal Soul thrills through the whole Creation, doing the behests of that Reason from which it overflowed, unwillingly, into the storm and crowd of material appearances; warring with the brute forces of gross matter, crushing all which is foul and dissonant to itself, and clasping to its bosom the beautiful, and all wherein it discovers its own reflex; impressing on it its signature, reproducing from it its own likeness, whether star, or daemon, or soul of the elect:—and yet, as the poet hints in anthropomorphic language, haunted all the while by a sadness— weighed down amid all its labours by the sense of a fate—by the thought of that First One from whom the Soul is originally descended; from whom it, and its Father the Reason before it, parted themselves when they dared to think and act, and assert their own free will.

‘And in the meanwhile, alas! Hector, the father, fights around, while his children sleep and feed; and he is away in the wars, and they know him not-know not that they the individuals are but parts of him the universal. And yet at moments—oh! thrice blessed they whose celestial parentage has made such moments part of their appointed destiny—at moments flashes on the human child the intuition of the unutterable secret. In the spangled glory of the summer night—in the roar of the Nile-flood, sweeping down fertility in every wave—in the awful depths of the temple-shrine—in the wild melodies of old Orphic singers, or before the images of those gods of whose perfect beauty the divine theosophists of Greece caught a fleeting shadow, and with the sudden might of artistic ecstasy smote it, as by an enchanter’s wand, into an eternal sleep of snowy stone —in these there flashes on the inner eye a vision beautiful and terrible, of a force, an energy, a soul, an idea, one and yet million-fold, rushing through all created things, like the wind across a lyre, thrilling the strings into celestial harmony—one life-blood through the million veins of the universe, from one great unseen heart, whose thunderous pulses the mind hears far away, beating for ever in the abysmal solitude, beyond the heavens and the galaxies, beyond the spaces and the times, themselves but veins and runnels from its all-teeming sea.

‘Happy, thrice happy! they who once have dared, even though breathless, blinded with tears of awful joy, struck down upon their knees in utter helplessness, as they feel themselves but dead leaves in the wind which sweeps the universe—happy they who have dared to gaze, if but for an instant, on the terror of that glorious pageant; who have not, like the young Astyanax, clung shrieking to the breast of mother Nature, scared by the heaven-wide flash of Hector’s arms, and the glitter of his rainbow crest! Happy, thrice happy,! even though their eyeballs, blasted by excess of light, wither to ashes in their sockets!—Were it not a noble end to have seen Zeus, and die like Semele, burnt up by his glory? Happy, thrice happy! though their mind reel from the divine intoxication, and the hogs of Circe call them henceforth madmen and enthusiasts. Enthusiasts they are; for Deity is in them, and they in It. For the time, this burden of individuality vanishes, and recognising themselves as portions of the universal Soul, they rise upward, through and beyond that Reason from whence the soul proceeds, to the fount of all—the ineffable and Supreme One—and seeing It, become by that act portions of Its essence. They speak no more, but It speaks in them, and their whole being, transmuted by that glorious sunlight into whose rays they have dared, like the eagle, to gaze without shrinking, becomes an harmonious vehicle for the words of Deity, and passive itself, utters the secrets of the immortal gods! What wonder if to the brute mass they seem as dreamers? Be it so …. Smile if you will. But ask me not to teach you things unspeakable, above all sciences, which the word-battle of dialectic, the discursive struggles of reason, can never reach, but which must be seen only, and when seen confessed to be unspeakable. Hence, thou disputer of the Academy!— hence, thou sneering Cynic!—hence, thou sense-worshipping Stoic, who fanciest that the soul is to derive her knowledge from those material appearances which she herself creates! .... hence—; and yet no: stay and sneer if you will. It is but a little time—a few days longer in this prison-house of our degradation, and each thing shall return to its own fountain; the blood-drop to the abysmal heart, and the water to the river, and the river to the shining sea; and the dew-drop which fell from heaven shall rise to heaven again, shaking off the dust-grains which weighed it down, thawed from the earth-frost which chained it here to herb and sward, upward and upward ever through stars and suns, through gods, and through the parents of the gods, purer and purer through successive lives, till it enters The Nothing, which is The All, and finds its home at last.’....

And the speaker stopped suddenly, her eyes glistening with tears, her whole figure trembling and dilating with rapture. She remained for a moment motionless, gazing earnestly at her