Why Homer Matters Read Free Page B

and vanity, and despite that knowledge didn’t surrender hope of nobility and integrity and doing the right thing. Before I read Pope’s Preface to the Iliad , or Matthew Arnold’s famous lectures on translating Homer, I knew that this was the human spirit on fire, rapidity itself, endlessly able to throw off little sidelights like the sparks thrown off by the wheels of an engine hammering through the night. Speed, scale, violence, threat; but every spark with humanity in it.

 
    2 • GRASPING HOMER
    Paris, 11 May 1863, Le Repas Magny, a small restaurant up a cobbled street on the Left Bank in the Sixième. Brilliant, literary, skeptical Paris had gathered, as usual, for its fortnightly dinner. The stars were there: the critic and historian Charles Sainte-Beuve; the multitalented and widely admired playwright and novelist Théophile Gautier; the unconscionably fat Breton philosopher, the most brilliant cultural analyst of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan; the idealistic and rather intense Comte de Saint-Victor, a minor poet and upholder of traditional values; and observing them all the supremely waspish Jules de Goncourt, with his brother Edmond.
    The Magny dinners, every other Monday, were ten francs a head, the food “mediocre” apparently, everyone shouting their heads off, smoking for France, coming and going as they felt like it, the only place in Paris, it was said, where there was freedom to speak and think. Jules de Goncourt transcribed it all.
    *   *   *
    â€œBeauty is always simple,” the Comte de Saint-Victor said as the waiters brought in the wine. He had a way, when saying something he thought important, of putting his face in the air like an ostrich laying an egg. “There is nothing more beautiful than the feelings of Homer’s characters. They are still fresh and youthful. Their beauty is their simplicity.”

    Magny’s restaurant, in the rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine, Paris.
    â€œOh for Christ’s sake,” Edmond groaned, looking over at his brother. “Must we? Homer, again ?”
    Saint-Victor paused a moment, went white and then very deep red like some kind of mechanical toy.
    â€œAre you feeling well?” Goncourt said to him across the table. “It looks as if Homer might be playing havoc with your circulation.”
    â€œHow can you say that? Homer, how can I put it … Homer … Homer is … so bottomless !”
    Everyone laughed.
    â€œMost people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,” Gautier said calmly. “They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.”
    â€œAny modern novel,” Edmond said, “is more moving than Homer.”
    â€œ What ?” Saint-Victor screamed at him across the table, banging his little fist against his head so that his curls shook.
    â€œYes, Adolphe , that lovely sentimental love story by Benjamin Constant, the sweet way they all behave to each other, his charming little obsession with her, the way she doesn’t admit she wants to go bed with him, the lust boiling away between her thighs, all of that is more moving than Homer, actually more interesting than anything in Homer.”
    â€œDear God alive,” Saint-Victor shrieked. “It’s enough to make a man want to throw himself out of the window.” His eyes were standing out of his head like a pair of toffee-apples.
    â€œThat would be original,” Edmond said. “I can see it now: ‘Poet skewers himself on street-lamp because someone said something horrid about Homer.’ Do go on. It would be more diverting than anything that has happened for