ted by
Matthew Arnold in _On Translating Homer._]

There it is the sudden antithesis from her gentle womanly inquiry
about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that
strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner. Then there
is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos:

"Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know
the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness
known to mortals was granted them: the one on the mountain,
the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded
Muses sing."

You hear the high pride and pathos in that. To be a poet, he
says: to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing: is the highest
happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the
Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he
acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not
the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace
happiness of feeling secure against dark fate. It is the same
feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the
early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the
swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand
manner. The pride is lacking quite: the intuition for a
divinity within man. But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and
pet-hood against the sorrow of fate: even though he finds the
sorrow weighs it down. Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said: "It
is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have
many recompenses." How different the note of Milton:

"Those other two, equal with me in fate,
So were I equal with them in renown--"

or:

"Unchanged, though fallen on evil days;
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and by dangers compassed round."

And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have anticipated the blows
of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been
astonished at fate's presumption.

We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:

_Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai_--

"Thou to, we hear, old man, e'en thou was at once time happy;"

_Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin
Zoein achnumenous. Autoi de l'akedees eisin_--

"The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful,
Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."

Proud--no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense;
there is a resig