The Queen of the Air | Page 8

you shall only
be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in bettering
yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly with a
general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtile that you
shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food;
and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only find by
slow mining for it,--which is withheld on purpose, and close-locked,
that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace of
your own heating. And this withholding of their meaning is continual,
and confessed, in the great poets. Thus Pindar says of himself: "There
is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the wise, but, for the
many, they need interpreters." And neither Pindar, nor Æschylus, nor
Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or teachers of any
nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional reservation; nay, beyond
this, there is often a meaning which they themselves cannot interpert
[sic],--which it may be for ages long after them to intrepert [sic],--in
what they said, so far as it recorded true imaginative vision. For all the
greatest myths have been seen by the men who tell them, involuntarily
and passively,--seen by them with as great distinctness (and in some
respects, though not in all, under conditions as far beyond the control of
their will) as a dream sent to any of us by night when we dream clearest;
and it is this veracity of vision that could not be refused, and of moral

that could not be foreseen, which in modern historical inquiry has been
left wholly out of account; being indeed the thing which no merely
historical investigator can understand, or even believe; for it belongs
exclusively to the creative or artistic group of men, and can only be
interpreted by those of their race, who themselves in some measure also
see visions and dream dreams.
* Note, once for all, that unless when there is question about some
particular expression, I never translate literally, but give the real force
of what is said, as I best can, freely.
So that you may obtain a more truthful idea of the nature of Greek
religion and legend from the poems of Keats, and the nearly as
beautiful, and, in general grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent
work of Morris, than from frigid scholarship, however extensive. Not
that the poet's impressions or renderings of things are wholly true, but
their truth is vital, not formal. They are like sketches from the life by
Reynolds or Gainsborough, which may be demonstrably inaccurate or
imaginary in many traits, and indistinct in others, yet will be in the
deepest sense like, and true; while the work of historical analysis is too
often weak with loss, through the very labor of its miniature touches, or
useless in clumsy and vapid veracity of externals, and complacent
security of having done all that is required for the portrait, when it has
measured the breadth of the forehead and the length of the nose.
18. The first of requirements, then, for the right reading of myths, is the
understanding of the nature of all true vision by noble persons; namely,
that it is founded on constant laws common to all human nature; that it
perceives, however darkly, things which are for all ages true; that we
can only understand it so far as we have some perception of the same
truth; and that its fulness is developed and manifested more and more
by the reverberation of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in
succeeding ages. You will understand Homer better by seeing his
reflection in Dante, as you may trace new forms and softer colors in a
hillside, redoubled by a lake.
I shall be able partly to show you, even to-night, how much, in the
Homeric vision of Athena, has been made clearer by the advance of
time, being thus essentially and eternally true; but I must in the outset
indicate the relation to that central thought of the imagery of the
inferior deities of storm.

19. And first I will take the myth of Æolus (the "sage Hippotades" of
Milton), as it is delivered pure by Homer from the early times.
Why do you suppose Milton calls him "sage"? One does not usually
think of the winds as very thoughtful or deliberate powers. But hear
Homer: "Then we came to the Æolian island, and there dwelt Æolus
Hippotades, dear to the deathless gods; there he dwelt in a floating
island, and round it was a wall of brass that could not be broken; and
the smooth rock of it ran up sheer. To whom twelve