Читать книгу A Preface to Paradise Lost - C. S. Lewis - Страница 7

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And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory

Embroidered with names of the Djinns—a miraculous weaving—

But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.

kipling.

The most obvious characteristic of an oral technique is its continual use of stock words, phrases, or even whole lines. It is important to realize at the outset that these are not a second-best on which the poets fall back when inspiration fails them: they are as frequent in the great passages as in the low ones. In 103 lines of the parting between Hector and Andromache (justly regarded as one of the peaks of European poetry) phrases, or whole lines, which occur again and again in Homer are twenty-eight times employed (Il. vi, 390-493). Roughly speaking, a quarter of the whole passage is ‘stock’. In Beowulf’s last speech to Wiglaf (Beow. 2794-2820) ‘stock’ expressions occur six times in twenty-eight lines—again, they are about a quarter of the whole.

This phenomenon has been explained often enough from the poet’s side. “These repetitions,” says Mr Nilsson, “are a great aid for the singer for whilst reciting them mechanically he is subconsciously forming the next verse” (Homer and Mycenae, p. 203). But all art is made to face the audience. Nothing can be left exposed, however useful to the performer, which is not delightful or at least tolerable to them. A stage set must be judged from in front. If the poet’s ease were the sole consideration, why have a recitation at all? Is he not very well already, with his wine at his elbow and his share in the roast pork? We must therefore consider what these repetitions do for the hearers, not what they do for the poet. And we may observe that this is the only aesthetic or critical question. Music means not the noises it is nice to make, but the noises it is nice to hear. Good poetry means not the poetry men like composing, but the poetry men like to listen to or to read.

If any one will make the experiment for a week or two of reading no poetry and hearing a good deal, he will soon find the explanation of the stock phrases. It is a prime necessity of oral poetry that the hearers should not be surprised too often, or too much. The unexpected tires us: it also takes us longer to understand and enjoy than the expected. A line which gives the listener pause is a disaster in oral poetry because it makes him lose the next line. And even if he does not lose the next, the rare and ebullient line is not worth making. In the sweep of recitation no individual line is going to count for very much. The pleasure which moderns chiefly desire from printed poetry is ruled out anyway. You cannot ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. That is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up of isolated effects; the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, ‘good’ lines is like looking for single ‘good’ stones in a cathedral.

The language, therefore, must be familiar in the sense of being expected. But in Epic which is the highest species of oral court poetry, it must not be familiar in the sense of being colloquial or commonplace. The desire for simplicity is a late and sophisticated one. We moderns may like dances which are hardly distinguishable from walking and poetry which sounds as if it might be uttered ex tempore. Our ancestors did not. They liked a dance which was a dance, and fine clothes which no one could mistake for working clothes, and feasts that no one could mistake for ordinary dinners, and poetry that unblushingly proclaimed itself to be poetry. What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse, if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them? It will be seen that these two demands, taken together, absolutely necessitate a Poetic Diction; that is, a language which is familiar because it is used in every part of every poem, but unfamiliar because it is not used outside poetry. A parallel, from a different sphere, would be turkey and plum pudding on Christmas day; no one is surprised at the menu, but every one recognizes that it is not ordinary fare. Another parallel would be the language of a liturgy. Regular church-goers are not surprised by the service—indeed, they know a good deal of it by rote; but it is a language apart. Epic diction, Christmas fare, and the liturgy, are all examples of ritual—that is, of something set deliberately apart from daily usage, but wholly familiar within its own sphere. The element of ritual which some dislike in Milton’s poetry thus comes into epic at the very beginning. Its propriety in Milton will be considered later; but those who dislike ritual in general—ritual in any and every department of life—may be asked most earnestly to reconsider the question. It is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feelings by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.

This is the common ground of all oral poetry. Against it we can now discern differences between one poem and another. The epic diction of Homer is not the same as that of Beowulf. It seems to me almost certain, from the language and metre, that the Greek epic was recited more quickly. It therefore needs more, and more complete, repetition.

The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy-fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker of earth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere ill represented in literature. What is really in our minds when we first catch sight of the sea after a long absence, or look up, as watchers in a sickroom or as sentries, to see yet another daybreak? Many things, no doubt—all manner of hopes and fears, pain or pleasure, and the beauty or grimness of that particular sea and that particular dawn. Yes; but under all these, like a base so deep as to be scarcely audible, there is something which we might very lamely express by muttering “same old sea” or “same old morning.” The permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the differences between life and imagined life. But in Homer the pressure is there. The sonorous syllables in which he has stereotyped the sea, the gods, the morning, or the mountains, make it appear that we are dealing not with poetry about the things, but almost with the things themselves. It is this that produces what Kinglake (Eothen, cap. iv) called “the strong vertical light of Homer’s poetry” and made Mr Barfield say that in it “not man was creating, but the gods” (Poetic Diction, p. 96).

The general result of this is that Homer’s poetry is, in an unusual degree, believable. There is no use in disputing whether any episode could really have happened. We have seen it happen—and there seemed to be no poet mediating between us and the event. A girl walks on the shore and an unknown lover embraces her, and a darkly shining wave arched over them like a coverlet while they lay; and when he had ended his deeds of love, he told his name, “Lo, I am Poseidon, shaker of earth” (Od. xi, 242-252). Because we have had “shaker of earth” time and again in these poems where no miracle was involved, because those syllables have come to affect us almost as the presence of the unchanging sea in the real world, we are compelled to accept this. Call it nonsense, if you will; we have seen it. The real salt sea itself, and not any pantomime or Ovidian personage living in the sea, has got a mortal woman with child. Scientists and theologians must explain it as best they can. The fact is not disputable.

The diction also produces the unwearying splendour and ruthless poignancy of the Homeric poems. Miserable or even sordid events may happen; but the brightness of the sun, the “leaf-shaking” largeness of the mountains, the steady strength of rivers, is there all the time, not with any suggestion (as it might be in a romantic poet) of the ‘consolations of nature’ but simply as a fact. Homeric splendour is the splendour of reality. Homeric pathos strikes hard precisely because it seems unintended and inevitable like the pathos of real life. It comes from the clash between human emotions and the large, indifferent background which the conventional epithets represent. Ὣς φάτο, τοὺς δ᾿ ἤδη κάτεχεν φυσίζοος αῖα. (Il. iii, 243). Thus Helen spoke about her brothers, thinking them alive, but in fact the life-giving earth already covered them, in Lacedaemon, their dear fatherland. Ruskin’s comment cannot be improved upon: “Note here the high poetical truth carried to the extreme. The poet has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not let that sadness affect or change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving. These are the facts of the thing. I see nothing else than these. Make what you will of them” (Modern Painters, iv, xiii, Of the Pathetic Fallacy). And yet even this does not quite exhaust the passage. In translating we have had to say “their dear fatherland.” But dear is misleading. The word that Homer uses does not really describe any one’s emotions at any particular moment. It is used whenever he mentions anything which is a man’s own, so that a dull critic might say it was simply the Homeric Greek for own the adjective. But it is rather more than that. It is the word for dear, but by being always used comes to suggest that unalterable relation, far deeper than fondness and compatible with all changes of mood, which unites a normal man to his wife, his home, or his own body—the tie of a mutual ‘belonging’ which is there even when he dislikes them.

We must avoid an error which Ruskin’s words might suggest. We must not think of Homer calculating these effects, line by line, as a modern poet might do. Once the diction has been established it works of itself. Almost anything the poet wants to say, has only to be turned into this orthodox and ready-made diction and it becomes poetry. “Whatever Miss T. eats turns into Miss T.” The epic diction, as Goethe said, is “a language which does your thinking and your poetizing for you” (Eine Sprache die für dich dichtet und denkt). The conscious artistry of the poet is thus set free to devote itself wholly to the large-scale problems—construction, character drawing, invention; his verbal poetics have become a habit, like grammar or articulation. I have avoided using such words as automatic or mechanical which carry a false suggestion. A machine is made out of inorganic materials and exploits some non-human power, such as gravitation, or the force of steam. But every single Homeric phrase was originally invented by a man and is, like all language, a human thing. It is like a machine in so far as the individual poet liberates, by using it, power other than his own; but it is stored human life and human experience which he is liberating—not his own life and experience, but none the less human and spiritual. The picture of a Muse—a super-personal figure, yet anthropomorphically conceived—is therefore really more accurate than that of some kind of engine. No doubt all this is very unlike the recipe for poetry which finds favour to-day. But there is no fighting against facts. Make what you can of it, the result of this wholly artificial diction is a degree of objectivity which no other poetry has ever surpassed. Homer accepts artificiality from the outset: but in the result he is something for which ‘natural’ is too weak an epithet. He has no more need to bother about being ‘natural’ than Nature herself.

To a limited extent the technique of Beowulf is the same as that of Homer. It, too, has its reiterated expressions, under wolcnum, in geardum, and the like, and its ‘poetical’ names for most of the things the author wants to mention. One of its differences from Homer, indeed, is the number of synonymous words which the poet can use for the same thing: Homer has no list of alternatives to compare to the Beowulfian words for man—beorn, freca, guma, hæleþ, secg, wer. In the same way, Beowulf is fonder than Homer of partial repetition, of using slightly varied forms of a poetic phrase or compound. Thus, from the passage already mentioned, Wuldorcyninge does not, I think, occur elsewhere in the poem, but wuldres wealdend and wuldres hyrde do. Wordum secge is similarly a partial repetition of wordum bædon, wordum wrixlan, and wordum nægde; wyrd forsweop, of wyrd fornam, deaþ fornam, and guþdeaþ fornam. In part, this difference of technique goes with a shorter line, a language more full of consonants, and doubtless a slower and more emphatic delivery. It goes with the difference between a quantitative metre and one which uses both quantity and stress accent, demanding their union for that characteristic of alliterative verse which is called weight. One of Homer’s great passages is like a cavalry charge; one of Beowulf’s, like blows from a hammer or the repeated thunder of breakers on the beach. The words flow in Homer; in Beowulf they fall apart into massive lumps. The audience has more time to chew on them. Less help is needed from pure reiteration.

All this is not unconnected with a deeper difference of temper. The objectivity of the unchanging background which is the glory of Homer’s poetry, is not equally a characteristic of Beowulf. Compared with the Iliad, Beowulf is already, in one sense, ‘romantic’. Its landscapes have a spiritual quality. The country which Grendel haunts expresses the same things as Grendel himself: the “visionary dreariness” of Wordsworth is foreshadowed. Poetry has lost by the change, but it has gained, too. The Homeric Cyclops is a mere puppet beside the sad, excluded ellorgast, or the jealous and joyless dragon, of the English poem. There is certainly not more suffering behind Beowulf than there is behind the Iliad; but there is a consciousness of good and evil which Homer lacks.

The ‘proper’ oral technique of the later poem, that which distinguishes it most sharply from Homer, is the variation or parallelism which most of us have first met in the Psalms. “He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn; the Lord shall have them in derision.” The rule is that nearly everything must be said more than once. The cold prose about the ship in which Scyld’s dead body was sent away (Beow. 50) is that nobody knew what became of it. The poetical rendering is that “Men knew not to say for a truth, the talkers in the hall knew not, warriors under the sky knew not, who received that cargo.”