Chapter 5

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.

Now, what the Bible became to the English, Homer became to the Greeks--and more also. They heard his grand manner, and were billed by it with echoes from the Supermundane. _Anax andron Agamemnon_--what Greek could hear a man so spoken of, and dream he compounded of common clay? Never mind what this king of men did or failed to do; do but breathe his name and titles, and you have affirmed immortality and the splendor of the Human Soul! The _human_ Soul?

"Tush!" said they, "the Greek Soul! he was a Greek as we are!".... And so Tomides, Dickaion and Harryotatos, Athenian tinkers and cobblers, go swaggering back to their shops, and dream grand racial dreams. For this is a much more impressionable people than the English; any wind from the Spirit blows in upon their minds quickly and easily. Homer in Greece --once Solon, or Pisistratus, or Hopparchus, had edited and canonized him, and arranged for his orderly periodical public reading (as the Bible in the churches)--had an advantage even over the Bible in England. When Cromwell and his men grew mighty upon the deeds of the mighty men of Israel, they had to thrill to the grand rhythms until a sort of miracle had been accomplished, and they had come to see in themselves the successors and living representatives of Israel. But the Greek, rising on the swell of Homer's roll and boom, had need of no such transformation. The uplift was all for him; his by hereditary right; and no pilfering necessary, from alien creed or race. We have seen in Homer an inspired Race-patriot, a mighty poet saddened and embittered by the conditions he saw and his own impotence to change them.--Yes, he had heard the golden-snooded sing; but Greeks were pygmies, compared with the giants who fought at Ilion! There was that eternal contrast between the glory he had within and the squalor he saw without. Yes, he could sing; he could launch great songs for love of the ancients and their magnificence. But what could a song do? Had it feet to travel Hellas; hands to flash a sword for her; a voice and kingly authority to command her sons into redemption?--Ah, poor blind old begging minstrel, it had vastly greater powers and organs than these!

Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to do it, if done it could be. Then for about two hundred and sixty years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having your way with your Greeks. Your music was ringing in the ears of mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long roll of your hexameters. There came to be manuscripts of you in every city: corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi, to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good speculation to praise. You were everywhere in Greece: a great and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature: by the time Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized. Solon, Pisistratus, or one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of the Hellenes. From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less articulate Iliad. From Plato and others we get hints leading to the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see there should be no transgression by the chanters.* The wandering songs of the old blind minstrel have become the familiar Sacred Book of the brightest-minded people in Greece.

* For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer and the Homeridae. ------

Some sixty years pass, and now look what happens. A mighty Power in Asia arranges a punitive expedition against turbulent islanders and coast-dwellers on its western border. But an old blind minstrel has been having his way with these: and the punitive expedition is to be of the kind not where you punish, but where you are punished;--has been suggesting to them, from the Olympus of his sacrosanct inspiration, the idea of great racial achievement, till it has become a familiar thing, ideally, in their hearts.--The huge armies and the fleets come on; Egypt has gone down; Lydia has gone down; the whole world must go down before them. But there is an old blind minstrel, long since grown Olympian in significance, and throned aloft beside Nephelegereta Zeus, chanting in every Greek ear and heart. Greeks rise in some sort to repel the Persian: Athens and Sparta, poles apart in every feeling and taste, find that under the urge of archaic hexameters and in the face of this common danger, they can co-operate after a fashion. The world is in a tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters, and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting. The soul of a nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music of olden proud resounding lines. Who led the Grecian fleet at Salamis?--Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these centuries. Who led the victors at Marathon? Not sly Athenian Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth: blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian eye could see: the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias; Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to us only from the Greek side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically Prohellene. We are to think that Europe since has been great and free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism. All of which is great nonsense. Europe since has not been great and free and glorious; very often she has been quite the reverse. She has, at odd times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government; which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found long ago. As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been with the one, now with the other. And the Persians were not barbarians by any means. And when you talk of Asia, remember that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to England. Let us have not more of this preoccupation with externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man. I suppose ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were specified, when it was said _Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?_...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way. Empires wax and wane like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately, upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes. Two things you can posit about any empire: it will expand to its maximum; then ebb and fall away. Though the daily sun sets not on its boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been found, nor ever will be. There is an impulse from the inner planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and leaves them to their fall. Its cycle may perhaps be longer or shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time. What hindered Rome from mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it forever? Nothing--but the eternal Cyclic Law. So Persia.

She was the last phase of that West Asian manvantara which began in 1890 and was due to end in 590 B. C. As such a phase, a splendor-day of thirteen decades should have been hers; that, we find, being always the length of a national illumination. She began under Cyrus in 558; flowed out under Cambyses and Darius to her maximum growth--for half the thirteen decades expanding steadily. Then she touched Greece, where a younger cycle was rising, and recoiled. She should have been at high tide precisely three years before-Marathon--a half-cycle after the accession of Cyrus, or in 493;--and was. Then the Law-pronounced its _Thus far and no further;_ and enforced it with Homer's songs, and Greek valor, and Darius' death, and Xerxes' fickle childishness (he smacked the Hellespont because it was naughty). These things together brought to naught the might and ambition and bravery of Iran; but had they been lacking, the Law would have found other means. Though Xerxes and Themistocles had both sat at home doing nothing, Alexander would still have marched east in his time, and Rome conquered the world. So discount all talk of Greece's having saved Europe, which was never in danger. But you may say Persia saved Greece: that her impact kindled the fires--was used by the Law for that purpose--which so brilliantly have illumined Europe since.

Persia rose in the evening of that West Asian manvantara; the empires of its morning and noon, as Assyria chiefly, had been slower of growth, longer of life, smaller of expanse; and for her one, had several periods of glory. A long habit of empire -building had been formed there, which carried Persia rapidly and easily to her far limits. Assyria, the _piece de resistance_ of the whole manvantara, with huge and long effort had created, so to say, an astral mold; of which Persia availed herself, and overflowed its boundaries, conquering regions east and west Assyria never knew. But if she found the mold and the habit there to aid her, she came too late for the initial energies of the morning, or the full forces of the manvantaric noon. Those had been wielded by the great Tiglath Pilesers and Assurbanipals of earlier centuries; fierce conquerors, splendid builders, ruthless patrons of the arts. What was left for the evening and Persia could not carry her outward her full thirteen decades, but only half of them: sixty-five years her tides were rising, and then she touched Greece. Thence-forward she remained stationary within her borders, not much troubled internally, until the four -twenties. To a modern eye, she seems on the decline since Marathon; to a Persian of the time, probably, that failure on the Greek frontier looked a small matter enough. A Pancho Villa to chase; if you failed to catch him, pooh, it was nothing! Xerxes is no Darius, true: Artaxerxes I, no Cyrus, nor nothing like. But through both their reigns there is in the main good government in most of the provinces; excellent law and order; and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the Persians. Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you would have seen no great falling off. Hystaspes himself had been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;--though great at that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that failed. For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors, and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile. Well; and Xerxes carried it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send ships to sail round Africa? If there was no more conquering, it was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would bother about that Greece?--Darius Hystaspes was the last strong kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til 434. So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of comfortable, even glorious, years.