‘Beauty 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.’
‘Oh 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. ‘Are you feeling well?’ Goncourt said to him across the table. ‘It looks as if Homer might be playing havoc with your circulation.’
‘How can you say that? Homer, how can I put it … Homer … Homer is … so bottomless!’ Everyone laughed.
‘Most 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.’
‘Any modern novel,’ Edmond said, ‘is more moving than Homer.’
‘What?’ Saint-Victor screamed at him across the table, banging his little fist against his head so that his curls shook.
‘Yes, 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.’
‘Dear 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.
‘That 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 weeks.’
Chairs were shoved back from the table, somebody knocked over a bottle of wine, the waiter was standing ghoul-faced at the door, Saint-Victor was stamping and roaring like a baby bull in his own toy bullring, as red in the face as if somebody had said his father was a butcher and his mother a tart. Everyone was bellowing.
‘I wouldn’t care if all the Greeks were dead!’
‘If only they were!’
‘But Homer is divine.’
‘He has got nothing to teach us!’
‘He’s just a novelist who never learned how to write a novel.’
‘He says the same thing over and over again.’
‘But isn’t it deeply moving,’ Saint-Victor said imploringly, ‘when Odysseus’s dog wags the last sad final wag of his tail?’
‘You can always tell a bully,’ Edmond said quietly to his brother. ‘He loves dogs more than their owners.’
‘Homer, Homer,’ Sainte-Beuve was murmuring through the uproar.
‘Isn’t it strange,’ Jules said to Renan afterwards. ‘You can argue about the Pope, say that God doesn’t exist, question anything, attack heaven, the Church, the Holy Sacrament, anything except Homer.’
‘Yes,’ Renan said. ‘Literary religions are where you find the real fanatics.’
Homer loomed up again at another Magny dinner the following October. They were talking about God, whether God was definable or even knowable. Renan ended up by comparing God, his particular God, in all possible piety and seriousness, to an oyster. Uniquely itself, beautifully self-sufficient, not entirely to be understood, mysteriously attractive, mysteriously unattractive, wholly wonderful: what was not Godlike about the oyster? Rolling laughter swept up and down the table.
That was when Homer emerged. To the Goncourts’ horror, these modern, sceptical destroyers of faith, the most fearless critics of God that France had ever known, burst into a song of Homeric praise which made the brothers retch. The diners at le Repas Magny might have been partisans of progress, but all agreed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work was written in which everything was divine, above all discussion and even all examination. They began to swoon with admiration over individual phrases.
‘The long-tailed birds!’ [Hippolyte] Taine, [the philosopher and historian] cried out enthusiastically.
‘The unharvestable sea!’ exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, raising his little voice. ‘A sea where there are no grapes! What could be more beautiful than that?’
‘Unharvestable sea?’ What on earth did that mean? Renan thought some Germans had discovered a hidden significance in it. ‘And what is that?’ asked Sainte-Beuve.
‘I can’t remember,’ Renan replied, ‘but it’s wonderful.’
The Goncourt brothers sat back, regarding this mass expression of Homer-love with their habitual, jaundiced eye.
‘Well, what do you have to say, you over there,’ Taine called out, addressing them, ‘you who wrote that antiquity was created to be the daily bread of schoolmasters?’
So far the brothers had said nothing, and had let the Homer-hosannas go swirling around the dining room without comment, but now Jules said: ‘Oh, you know, we think [Victor] Hugo has more talent than Homer.’
It was blasphemy. Saint-Victor sat as upright as a fence-post and then went wild with rage, shouting like a madman and shrieking in his tinny voice, saying that remarks like that were impossible to stomach, they were too much, insulting the religion of all intelligent people, that everybody admired Homer and that without him Hugo would not even exist. Hugo greater than Homer! What did the Goncourts know? What idiot novels had they been producing recently? He shouted and screamed, dancing up and down the room like an electrified marionette. The Goncourts shouted back, increasingly loudly, raging at the little supercilious poet, who for some reason thought he was more in touch with the meaning of things than they ever could be, sneering at them down his peaky red nose, while they could feel nothing but contempt for the man they would think of forever after as the nasty stuck-up little self-congratulatory Homer-lover.
* * *
These conversations seem as distant as the Bronze Age. Where now is our violence on behalf of a poet? Who feels this much about Homer? The Goncourts, with their scepticism and their modernism, their contempt for antiquity, have won the day. Their prediction has come more than true: the ancient world is now the daily bread not of schoolmasters but of academics. Everyone has heard of Homer, probably of the two poems, and many have read some passages; but no one today ends up shouting at dinner about him. Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote, or the phrases that recur in them.
Why should they? The place of Homer in our culture has largely withered away. I can only say that, for me, the growing experience of knowing Homer, of living with him in my life, has provided a kind of ballast. He is like a beautiful stone, monumentally present, a paternal foundation, large, slightly ill-defined, male and reliable. He is not a friend, a lover or a wife; far more of an underlayer than that, a form of reassurance that in the end there is some kind of understanding in the world. Goethe thought that if only Europe had considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy