The Greek View of Life | Page 3

an Interpretation of Nature.
When we try to conceive the state of mind of primitive man the first
thing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have felt
in the presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless,
he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculable
Something so alien and so hostile to himself. As fire it burns, as water
it drowns, as tempest it harries and destroys; benignant it may be at
times, in warm sunshine and calm, but the kindness is brief and
treacherous. Anyhow, whatever its mood, it has to be met and dealt
with. By its help, or, if not, in the teeth of its resistance, every step in
advance must be won; every hour, every minute, it is there to be
reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable
Thing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put
aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions,
only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply,
"it is something like myself." Every power of nature he presumes to be

a spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter,
the sea as Poseidon; from generation to generation under his shaping
hands, the figures multiply and define themselves; character and story
crystallise about what at first were little more than names; till at last,
from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the beginning,
there emerges into the charmed light of a world of ideal grace a
pantheon of fair and concrete personalities. Nature has become a
company of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; in
the ocean dwell the Nereids, in the mountain the Oread, the Dryad in
the wood; and everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures or
the rocky heights, floating in the current of the streams or traversing
untrodden snows, in the day at the chase and as evening closes in
solitude fingering his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or with
his dancing train, is to be met the horned and goat-footed, the sunny-
smiling Pan.
Thus conceived, the world has become less terrible because more
familiar. All that was incomprehensible, all that was obscure and dark,
has now been seized and bodied forth in form, so that everywhere man
is confronted no longer with blind and unintelligible force, but with
spiritual beings moved by like passions with himself. The gods, it is
true, were capricious and often hostile to his good, but at least they had
a nature akin to his; if they were angry, they might be propitiated; if
they were jealous, they might be appeased; the enmity of one might be
compensated by the friendship of another; dealings with them, after all,
were not so unlike dealings with men, and at the worst there was
always a chance for courage, patience and wit.
Man, in short, by his religion has been made at home in the world; and
that is the first point to seize upon. To drive it home, let us take an
illustration from the story of Odysseus. Odysseus, it will be
remembered, after the sack of Troy, for ten years was a wanderer on the
seas, by tempest, enchantment, and every kind of danger detained, as it
seemed, beyond hope of return from the wife and home he had left in
Ithaca. The situation is forlorn enough. Yet, somehow or other, beauty
in the story predominates over terror. And this, in part at least, because
the powers with which Odysseus has to do, are not mere forces of

nature, blind and indifferent, but spiritual beings who take an interest,
for or against, in his fate. The whole story becomes familiar, and, if one
may say so, comfortable, by the fact that it is conducted under the
control and direction of the gods. Listen, for example, to the Homeric
account of the onset of a storm, and observe how it sets one at ease
with the elements:
"Now the lord, the shaker of the earth, on his way from the Ethiopians,
espied Odysseus afar off from the mountains of the Solymi: even
thence he saw him as he sailed over the deep; and he was yet more
angered in spirit, and wagging his head he communed with his own
heart. 'Lo now, it must be that the gods at the last have changed their
purpose concerning Odysseus, while I was away among the Ethiopians.
And now he is nigh to the Phaeacian land, where it is so ordained that
he escape the great issues of the woe which hath come upon him. But
me-thinks, that even yet I will drive him far enough in the