Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

But Jupiter might have spared himself the trouble: the mountains would have tumbled of themselves.

Confusion of natural Phenomena.

Before parting from the subject, it may be well to give another example of the indifference of Virgil to the association between poetry, and the order of external nature as such. In the Fourth Æneid, he speaks of Mercury as passing over Mount Atlas on his way to Carthage; from what point I do not now inquire. The lines are these938;

Atlantis, cinctum assidue cui nubibus atrisPiniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri;Nix humeros infusa tegit: tum flumina mentoPræcipitant senis, et glacie riget horrida barba.

His pine-bearing head, girt with clouds, is beaten by wind and rain. So far so good. But while such is the temperature of the air at the summit, it grows colder, not warmer, as we descend: for snow covers his shoulders. This is the second image. Next, we mount again to his mouth, which discharges rivers over his chin: and not even here have we done with incongruity, for his beard, although thus watered from above, is rough and stiff with ice. Now such a confusion, as is here exhibited, of images which nature always exhibits in a fixed and very imposing order, is, we may be assured, no mere casual error, but indicates a rooted indifference about matters which the poets of nature study, not only with accuracy, but with an accuracy which is the fruit of their reverence and love.

The Dolopes of Homer are a part of the Myrmidons, for they are the subjects of Phœnix939, and Phœnix commands the fifth division of the Myrmidons: they are named by Virgil as a separate race940. The Rhadamanthus of Homer appears to have been conceived by the Poet as a mild and benevolent character, for he is placed in the Plains of the Blest, while Minos administers severer justice in the under-world. But the Rhadamanthus of Virgil is the judge of the infernal regions, and is the image of rigour; while his Minos941 has the very mild and also secondary function of dealing, in the vestibule of the Shades, with the cases of such persons as had been unjustly condemned on earth942. Again, where Homer uses exaggeration to enhance effect, Virgil carries it far into caricature. In the Iliad, Diomed943 heaves a stone, of a weight that ‘two men such as are nowadays (οἷοι νῦν βροτοί εἰσι) could scarcely lift.’ He allows for a short interval since the Trojan war, and says that two ordinary men of his day could scarcely lift what warriors of extraordinary strength, by an extraordinary effort, then raised and hurled. In another place, Ajax flings a stone, such as even a man in the fullest vigour could now scarcely hold944. Again, Hector discharges against the Greek rampart one which two strong men could hardly raise with a lever; but then he is specially aided by Jupiter945. Now in the Fifth Æneid, Æneas gives to Mnestheus, as a prize, a breastplate which he himself had won, the spoil of Demoleos. This Demoleos946 was no hero, for he is never named by Homer; again, the Demoleos of Virgil wore the breastplate when he chased the Trojans flying in all directions (‘palantes,’ Æn. v. 265), so that it must have been light to him: there was no time at all for human degeneracy, since they are still his contemporaries that are on the stage; and yet such was the weight of this breastplate, that two men together could scarcely carry it on their shoulders.

‘Vix illam famuli Phegeus Sagarisque ferebantMultiplicem, connixi humeris947.’

Let it not be thought that the varied examples, which have here been quoted, are either irrelevant or without serious significance. There cannot, surely, be a more decided error than to treat accuracy in matters of this kind as a matter of sheer indifference. It is not only inseparable from the function of the primitive Poet as the historian of his subject, but it appertains also to the perfection of his poetic nature, that he should have a nice sense of proportion even in figurative language. I have dwelt, however, upon minor points, not for their own sake, but because the manner in which Virgil handles them appears to throw no unimportant light upon the frame and temper of his work at large, and of the later as compared with the earliest poetry.

Contrast of principal aims.

In diction, Virgil is ornate and Homer simple; in metre, Virgil is uniform and sustained, Homer free and varied; in the faculty of invention, for which the historical office of early poetry still leaves ample room, Homer is inexhaustible, while, from the needless accumulation of imitations in every sort and size, Virgil gives ground to suspect that he was poor, at least by comparison. The first thought of Homer was his subject, and the second his nation; the first thought of Virgil was his Emperor and the court around the throne, the second the elaboration of his verse. Characters, feelings, facts, were used by Virgil for producing on the mind the effect of scenic representation; the end of Homer, on the contrary, was to give adequate vent, in and through these things poetically conceived and handled, to his own yearnings, and to the sympathies of his hearers948. The intercommunion of spirit between the poet and those to whom he sang, was not in him a sordid quest of popularity; it was only an expression of the truth that he founded both his composition and his hopes upon the basis of a great effort to be the organ of the general heart of mankind. All this we may discern in his notices, informal as they are, of the profession of the minstrel:

ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδὸν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων949·

in the names he assigns to them, where they were not historical characters, Δημόδοκος, and Φήμιος Τερπιάδης; in the moral uprightness with which he invests them; for, though it was the office of Phemius to delight, his heart was never with the licentious and guilty band that held the palace of Ulysses:

ὅς ῥ’ ἤειδε μετὰ μνηστῆρσιν ἀνάγκῃ950.

And again, in the offices of guardianship which they exercised; for Agamemnon, when he left his home for Troy, carefully enjoined upon the bard of his palace the care of Clytemnestra; and his advice, with her own right sense, for a time stood her in good stead951. Such was the bard in the living description of Homer; such he was represented in the Poet himself, never thrust into view, but ever understood, ever perceived, through his works. On the other hand, the character of the bard, as exhibited in Virgil, is what may be termed professional: the fire and power of genius may be in him, but they must work only under conventional forms, and for ends prescribed according to the spirit of that lower and narrower utility which is, not logically perhaps, but yet very effectively, denominated utilitarianism. A remarkably high form of exterior art, with a radical inattention to substance, both of facts and laws, has been the result in the case of Virgil. And it is rather significant, that this great Poet has nowhere placed upon his canvass the figure of the bard amidst the abodes of man; as if the very type had perished from the earth in those degenerate days, and the memory of him could not be recalled. An effete and corrupted age could no longer conceive a mind like the mind of Homer; an Æolian harp so finely strung, that it answers to the faintest movement of the air by a proportionate vibration: with every stronger current its music rises, along an almost immeasurable scale, which begins with the lowest and softest whisper, and ends in the full swell of the organ.

Change in the idea of the Poet’s office.

By a false association of ideas, we have come to place accuracy and genius in antagonism to one another. It is Homer who may best undeceive us: except indeed that most complete solution which the mind gladly perceives when, ascending to the Author of all being, it finds in Him alone the source and the perfection, alike of Order and of Light; alike of the most minute, and of the most gigantic operations. But among men Homer best exemplifies this union. It is not indeed the precision of dry facts, terminating upon itself: it is the precision of sympathies, of sympathies with nature and with man, to which the minute and scrupulous adjustments of Homer are to be referred; and this precision is probably due by no means to conscious effort, but to the spontaneous operations of the soul. In this view his far-famed, but not even yet fully fathomed, accuracy is no deduction from his greatness, but is in truth a proof of the near approach to perfection in the organization of his faculties. The later poets have too often torn asunder, what in him was harmoniously combined. They have conferred upon their art a deadly gift, in claiming first an exemption ad libitum from the laws, not only of dry fact, but of Truth in its higher sense, of harmony and self-consistency, and of all, except a merely external beauty, which was meant to be the vehicle and not the substitute for all those great and discarded qualities. In this work of laceration, Virgil has borne no secondary share.

Upon the whole, though it is doubtless natural that Virgil should be compared with Homer, the mind is astonished at finding that he should so often even have gained a preference. We may account for his being chosen as Dante’s guide, by their being countrymen, and by the almost universal ignorance of Greek when Dante wrote. It is far more staggering to find Saint Augustine emphatically call him952 Poeta magnus omniumque præclarissimus atque optimus; for he was no stranger to Greek influences, inasmuch as the philosophy of Plato had a very high place in his estimation953. Nor can this be readily accounted for, except by the advantage which Virgil had through writing in the Latin tongue, and by the very great decay of poetical tastes and perceptions.

Still let us not do wrong to the memory of him, who thrilled with an immeasurable love, as he bore the sacred vessels of the Muses; and who has received so unequivocally the seal of that approbation of mankind, prolonged through ages, which comes near to an infallible award. It is but fair to admit, that we must not measure the relative rank of Homer and Virgil simply by the comparative merits of their epic works. Homer lived in the genial and joyous youth of a poetic nation and a poetic religion, and amid the influences of the soul of freedom: Virgil among a people always matter-of-fact rather than poetical, in an age and a court where the heart and its emotions were chilled, where liberty was dead, where religion was a mockery, and the whole higher material of his art had passed from freshness into the sear and yellow leaf. Whether Virgil, if he had lived the life of Homer in Homer’s country and Homer’s time, could have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, may be more than doubtful; but it is indisputably clear that Homer could not have produced them, if it had been his misfortune to live at the date and in the sphere of Virgil.

I pass on now to make some attempt at comparison between the work of Tasso and the Iliad of Homer. But although the relation between the subjects appears to recommend the choice of Tasso for this purpose rather than any other Italian poet, I have to confess, that as far as the qualities of the men are concerned, both Bojardo and Ariosto are in my estimation more Homeric than Tasso; as being nearer to nature in its truest sense, as not conveying the same impression of perpetual effort and elaboration, as exempt from the temptation to the conceits so unhappily frequent in the Gerusalemme, and generally as working with a freer and broader touch, and exhibiting a more vigorous and elastic movement.

The War of Troy and the Crusades.

There is, however, a striking resemblance between the relation in which the Trojan war stood to Greece, and that of the Crusades to Western Europe. The political unity and collective existence of Greece was greatly due to the first, that of Christendom to the second. The combination of races and of chiefs, the arduous character and extraordinary prolongation of the effort, the chivalry displayed, the disorganizing effects upon the countries which supplied the invading army, the representation in each of Europe against Asia, of Western mankind meeting Eastern mankind in arms, and the proof of superior prowess in the former, establish many broad and deep analogies between the subjects of these poems. In both struggles, too, the object purported to be the recovery of that which the East had unrighteously acquired: and into both what is called sentiment far more largely entered, than is common in the history of the wars which have laid desolate our earth.

Exaggeration as used by Homer and by Tasso.

As Godfrey is Tasso’s version of Agamemnon, so the Rinaldo of Tasso occupies a place in the Jerusalem, similar to that of Achilles in the Iliad. Now the whole character of Achilles, mental and corporeal, which ranks at least among the most wonderful of all the works of Homer, is colossal and vast, but is not unduly exaggerated. Although the son of Peleus evidently was of great bodily size, yet Homer never calls him by the epithets μέγας and πελώριος, but reserves them for Ajax, because they suggest a predominance of the animal over the incorporeal element, which, in the case of Achilles, the Poet utterly eschews. The character of Rinaldo as a warrior (and in no other respect does he present any salient point) is, as will be shown, exaggerated unduly, but yet does not leave the impression of the vast or colossal, because the excess beyond common nature is not in harmony with the rest of the delineation.

Thus the strength of Achilles is the very highest; none can use his spear. But Rinaldo, in the assault of the Tower, does the work of a battering-ram. He takes up and carries a beam, of which we are told,

Nè così alte mai, nè così grosseSpiega l’ antenne sue ligura nave954.

With this he breaks the bars, and beats down the gates; and the stanza proceeds:

Non l’ ariète di far più si vanti,Non la bombarda, fulmine di morte955.

No such excess of muscular power as this is ascribed to Achilles; and yet a much more lively impression of grandeur in his martial character is left upon the mind of the reader; the fact being that mere exaggeration freezes, while the adjusted representation of greatness warms.

The largest size assigned by Homer to any even of his mythological personages who are in relations with man, and this only in the Shades below, is in the case of Otus and Ephialtes. At nine years old, when they were put to death, they were nine cubits broad, nine fathoms (fifty-four feet) high956. These were they, who piled the mountains up to heaven. They are among the few figures absolutely gigantic, which appear in Homer; but they hover only in the distance through the mists of the Under-world, and in describing even them he has adhered strictly to the limits of what may be termed the gigantesque. Further on, he describes Tityus as reaching over nine acres; but he nowhere presents any such person to us in active motion, or in any relation with man on earth. In Il. xxi. however, occurs a passage which it is more easy to impugn; for Mars, who had marched about among the Trojans and the Greeks in battle without driving either friends or foes from their propriety by his bulk, and had fought with Diomed in the plain of Troy on terms favourable to that hero, when overthrown by Minerva in the battle of the gods, covers seven acres (407). Although Homer has skilfully avoided localizing the conflict, this may be thought to wear the aspect of a poetical incongruity; because in the Mars of the Theomachy we cannot wholly forget the Mars of the plain. As a general rule, however, Homer does not employ vast size, except in cases where it can suggest no comparison with objects of ordinary dimensions, and where, accordingly, it in no way jars with our customary standard.

But if there be incongruity in the dimensions of the prostrate Mars of Homer, what shall we say to Tasso, who, carefully setting out in detail that his infernal assembly is held within the four walls of the palace of Pluto, describes the sub-terranean monarch, when he sits in actual council, as exceeding in mass, and that immeasurably, any mountain whatever?

Nè tanto scoglio in mar, nè rupe alpestra,Nè pur Calpe s’ innalza, o ’l magno Atlante,Ch’ anzi lui non paresse un picciol colle957.

Thus, where Homer is in excess, Tasso multiplies upon him by a thousandfold. This is not grandeur, but extravagance; nor is it vastness, but indistinctness, of which an impression is left upon the mind. The passage is followed by a description of the countenance and gorge of Pluto, which all readers must remember, but which all readers must likewise wish they could forget. In general it is curious to compare the very sparing use which Homer has made of mere bulk as a poetical engine, with the boundless redundance of it, not only even to nausea in such writers as Fortiguerra, who vulgarize everything they touch, but even in a patriarch of Italian romance like Bojardo.

It would not, however, repay the trouble to be entailed by the perusal, were I to draw out in detail a comparison between the diction, taste, figures, and all other incidents of poetic handling, in Tasso, and those of Homer. It is better to direct attention to what more easily admits of being brought into juxtaposition – that is, the general structure and movement of the poems, and the manner in which the greater laws of the poetic art are applied to the respective subjects.

Mr. Hallam adopts an opinion of Voltaire, that in the choice of his subject Tasso has been superior to Homer; and adds, that ‘in the variety of occurrences, in the change of scenes and images, and of the trains of sentiment connected with them in the reader’s mind, we cannot place the Iliad on a level with the Jerusalem;’ that, by unity of subject and place, the poem of Tasso has a coherence and singleness not to be found in the Æneid; and that, while we expect the victory of the Christians, ‘we acknowledge the probability and adequacy of the events that delay it958.’

Of the Italians themselves, some place the work of Tasso at the very head of all Epic compositions: others maintain, that it was surpassed by the Orlando Furioso. Tiraboschi, while declining to weigh the poems against each other generally, yet compares the poets, and gives the higher place to Ariosto959. Neither the agitated, struggling, and dependent life of Tasso, nor the character of the time in which he lived, were favourable to the attainment of the very summit of poetic excellence. The freshness of the morning of Christian civilization in Italy had worn away. The romantic poetry, which seemed so congenial to that country, and which had attained to such high perfection, had now run its course: it was rather an effort against nature, than a movement in the line of it, when Tasso wrought upon a subject which required him to bridle his country’s freer Muse, and train her to historic grandeur and severity. He has left us the undoubted work of a great mind, adorned with abundant and, in some respects, extraordinary beauties; yet many would own themselves not to have experienced from the Jerusalem that peculiar sort of satisfaction, which any work of simple tenour, if nearly approaching perfection in its kind, even though that kind be somewhat below the epic, never fails to impart to the mass of its readers.

Granting it to be true, that the Siege of Jerusalem is a nobler subject than the Wrath of Achilles, together with all that it includes of the siege of Troy, yet neither is the Siege of Jerusalem, with the high elements it comprehends, really the staple of the subject matter of Tasso, nor is the Siege of Troy the real subject of the poem of Homer. Tasso had evidently studied with attention the Iliad as well as the Æneid; and he has taken largely from, or worked largely after, both, but a great deal more, as far as I have seen, from the former than the latter. In which selection, doubtless, he chose well. The copy of a copy is pretty sure to be a vulgar work. Without noticing at present anything except what governs the main action, it may be observed, that the Wrath of Achilles is reproduced in the Offence, given and taken, of Rinaldo: and the relation of the one to Godfrey is evidently suggested by that of the other to Agamemnon.

Achilles the subject of the Iliad.

It is needful here to return to a topic, which I have already more lightly touched. We may reckon it among the chief distinctions of Homer, that he has been able to make of the individual man the broad basis of the most heroical among epic songs. The weak thread of the Æneid is really sustained by something that lies behind the figure of Æneas, namely, by its hanging on the splendid fortunes of Rome; the Odyssey is toned more nearly to the colour of a domestic painting; but in the Iliad, the man Achilles is the power whose action propels, and whose inaction stops, the world-wide conflict before Troy. The Poet has accomplished this great feat by dint of powers, that have given to the character of his hero on the one hand dimensions absolutely colossal, and, on the other, the finest lines that miniature itself could require.

For efforts of such a range as this, after-poets had not the necessary strength. They had not such command over the high-born material, of which man is formed, as to make their mode of treating it in one single figure the main stake, on which the fortune of their entire works was to depend. Men like Tasso sought and found a basis, less elevated indeed and splendid, but equally solid, and far more accessible, in the great events of history, or in the multitude of associations, alike noble and familiar, which belonged to them. These, which with Homer had been organically, and not mechanically alone, grouped about the one great Humanity of his poem, now became the central stem of the epic; and the properly and strictly personal element, which had been primary, became no more than accessory. But events are made for man, and not man for events; and we can scarcely doubt that the transition from the older epic, which gathered all its interests around the human soul as a centre, to the newer, which exhibits the human soul itself in a subordinate relation to external history or fortune, has been a transition downwards. It may be said, that Achilles is not the subject of the Iliad, in the same sense as Ulysses of the Odyssey. It is at any rate true that the action of the Odyssey is more directly related to the hero, than that of the Iliad. And so precise is the working of Homer’s intellect in all that appertains to poetical consistency, that a distinction of shade, just proportioned to this difference, is perhaps perceptible in the very exordia of the two poems, μῆνιν ἄειδε Θεὰ, and ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον. The one seems to propose the Wrath of the Man: the other the Man himself. But substantially the proposition is questionable: Achilles is in effect, as truly as Ulysses, the life and strength, the chief glory and beauty, of his own poem.

It might perhaps be doubted, whether even the Liberation of Jerusalem was a finer subject for Christendom, than the siege of Troy for the Greek race. For it is a mistake to suppose that because the Redemption of mankind infinitely transcends all other transactions, the poetry which is composed about it will therefore be excellent in proportion. But at any rate this is not the question. Homer’s subject is, indeed, the Titanic passion of Achilles, and to this subject every Book of the Iliad, some of them positively and some negatively, but every one of them effectively, contributes; but is the Liberation of Jerusalem the true subject of the poem of Tasso?

Subject of the Gerusalemme more doubtful.

The three first Cantos, with the ninth, the eleventh, and the nineteenth, are the only ones, which are in strictness occupied with the proper theme of the Jerusalem. The fifth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, and large portions at the least of the other eleven, are taken from the Siege, and are given to the truancy, or erratic and separate adventures, of those who ought to have carried it on; mainly of the two principal Christian warriors, Rinaldo and Tancredi. In short, near a moiety of the work is occupied, not with the Liberation of Jerusalem at all, but with the events which draw away the champions pledged to it, upon errands of a character the most incongruous with the grand design.

Will it be answered, that in the same manner Achilles disappears from the eye of the spectator during one moiety of the Iliad? The apparent parallel is wholly false. For the subject of the Iliad is the passion of Achilles; and the whole movement of the poem in his absence bears directly upon the enhancement and elevation of that subject. It exhibits to us the successive efforts of the Greeks, and of their most redoubted chieftains, one by one, to make up for the seclusion of Achilles from the fighting host. It was impossible for Homer more effectually to magnify his hero, than by recounting fully these exploits and their failure. In showing the perils and calamities brought about by his absence, they deeply impress us with the grandeur and efficacy of his presence, and prepare us for the reappearance of something more than man: of something which, but for a most skilful preparatory mechanism, we should probably have repelled as an unnatural exaggeration. But the love-born vagaries of the warriors of Tasso are mere impediments to the conquest of Jerusalem, and have no effect whatever in enhancing the poetical greatness of the achievement which was to crown the work, while they seriously deduct from the power and effectiveness, already in the case of Rinaldo but moderate, of the characters assigned to the warriors themselves.