Green Henry

I remembered Goethe’s Italian Journey which I had read, and Römer told me a great deal about the people and customs, and the past of Italy. He hardly ever read a book except for the German translation of Homer and an Italian edition of Ariosto. He asked me to read the Homer and I did not wait to be asked twice. To begin with, I could not get on with it; of course I thought it was all very beautiful, but I was too little used to a work of such simplicity and on so grand a scale, and I could not persevere with it for long at a time. But Römer pointed out to me how Homer, in every action and situation, used just what was necessary and appropriate, how every vessel and every article of clothing which he described was also at the same time in the finest taste imaginable, and finally how, with him, every situation and every moral conflict, though of an almost childlike simplicity, was steeped in the choicest poetry. ‘Nowadays people are always longing after what is exquisite, interesting and piquant, and yet are stupid enough not to know that there can be nothing more exquisite, more piquant, more eternally new than a Homeric conception in its simple classicism! I would not wish you, dear Lee, ever to learn from experience exactly the choice and piquant truth in the situation of Odysseus, when he appears, naked and covered with mud, before Nausicaa and her playmates! Do you want to know how this comes about? Let’s keep to this instance, now. Suppose you are wandering about in a strange land, cut off from your native country and from all that is dear to you, and you have seen a great deal and gone through a great deal, are full of care and anxiety, are, in short, utterly wretched and forsaken; then, at night, you will inevitably dream that you are approaching your native land. You see it gleaming and shining in the loveliest colours; beloved shapes, gracious and graceful, advance to meet you; then all at once you discover that you are wandering about ragged, naked, dust-begrimed; an unspeakable shame and anguish seizes you, you try to cover yourself, to hide, and you awake, bathed in sweat. This is, as long as there are human beings, the dream of the miserable man, who has been tossed hither and thither; and thus Homer has drawn this situation from the deepest and most permanent elements in humanity!’