331

ART. III.-Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. By the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, D.C.L., M.P. for the University of Oxford. 3 vols. 8vo. Oxford: at the University Press.

1858.

THERE are some dark periods in every history, spots isolated often from each other, and interrupting the connexion between tracks long ago opened up. They form an obstacle in the path of every historical inquirer, and a ready instance to all who wish to ridicule the notion of such a thing as certainty or credibility in such investigations. But some of these are obscure simply from want of any landmarks at all, others from the well-founded doubt that those landmarks which we possess may be themselves delusive. The former are like the sands of some estuary, like the Dee or Solway, hard and safe to the touch, but exposed to the sudden inroad of spring-tides sweeping over the expanse without note of warning, and obliterating every trace of the tra veller's footsteps. The latter more resemble a quicksand, under which the waves creep stealthily, till the man finds the spot to which he had run for safety, itself betraying him to destruction. There are three methods of investigating obscure periods of the first kind. The historical critic either may pursue his way right across them, making every tuft of reeds, or imbedded fragment of rock, a centre for fresh explorings, leaving all things as they were, but learning what they were; or he may turn aside from the real scene, and examine it as reflected in a glass which catches all the prominent points, whether sound footing or dangerous turbaries, and ignores every low-lying hollow; or, lastly, he may, without denying the existence there of solid historical truth, assert the impossibility of discerning the little true from the much that is false, or even our right to affirm that what was hard and solid beneath our feet to-day, will not be a treacherous swamp to

morrow.

Mr. Gladstone's grand object in his recent work is to uphold the first method, so far as regards the period illustrated by the Homeric poems, and, more especially, the Iliad. He has no occasion to deny that some portions of history may be unsound in their very foundations; that, in them, what truth there is has been irremediably involved and entangled in falsehood. His principle, as pursued in these volumes, will scarcely appear to be necessarily or actually opposed to that implied in Sir G. C. Lewis's severe assault on Niebuhr's 'Studies from Roman History.' The

6

6

noble lays of early Latium had been underlaid with a sort of illusion of grave historical plausibility by writers whose mind and style allowed of no distinction between early and late. They pared away all those more monstrous inconsistencies of tales of invented marvels, inserted in a setting of real circumstances, which would have been perpetual living landmarks by which to test and assay the inherent morsels of truth. Further, they tricked up the whole with fragments of legend and tradition, gathered up piecemeal from every side, that nothing might be lost, as one might tack together a ballad of bits of Chevy Chace' or Brave Mary Awbree.' But the Iliad and Odyssey are not registers of forms imagined by the fanciful eyes of a rhetorician in the smouldering embers of ancient poesy; they are no spectral mists, out of which a Livy standing on a far off eminence has pictured the shape and substance of the fens from which they rise, the lines and tracks through which he presupposes they resemble; they are, Mr. Gladstone urges, whether we care to trust to the facts they contain or not, the creation of a mind which existed amidst similar scenes and circumstances.

Whether in one man were concentrated all the marvellous genius of which these poems are the result and proof, or the heart of early Greece threw up, in its mighty throbs towards development, a whole band of illustrious bards, still there would be the same authority, derived from internal evidence, of perfect consistency between facts of character, and history, and society. Only because he is a poet, because historians now and poets are no longer the same; because the Middle Ages, in their darkest epochs, ever had a relatively enlightened caste, elevated above the sentiments and uncritical imagination of their countrymen, and which thus kept history distinct, though often by an imaginary boundaryline, from the ballad, is it that we refuse to Homer the name and place of Father of History. Herodotus adulterates with fable the whole substance of the circumstances, as well as the incidents which they unfold; Homer invents deeds and their doers perhaps, but they all act, or are performed, within the sphere of his experience, and in conformity to its laws. But in the days of Herodotus there existed poets as well as chroniclers, and so in the times of our Williams of Malmesbury and Henrys of Huntingdon; in those of Homer, prose was still an undiscovered art. Certainly, if he were not an historian, the age must be left to manage as it may without one; the place he is not allowed to fill can hardly be kept vacant for those who have borrowed their all from him, giving nothing of their own but conjectures.

The question, it must be remembered, is not whether the deeds recorded were actually performed, and by the men to whom they are ascribed; whether such an one was slain by Achilles, or Ajax

felled Hector with a spear. Mr. Gladstone, indeed, avows his personal belief in the precision of the leading narrative, in the truthfulness of every shade of character delineated as belonging to an Agamemnon or a Helen, and the veracity of the account of the whole of the war; but, he justly remarks, the historical character of the poems does not depend upon the accuracy of details such as these, but on the credibility of the description of the political and social life of the race and age. He might even have gone a step further, and waived all discussion of the problem, whether the age depicted were that both of the poems and the poet, or of the latter only. The inference, that he must have lived under, and witnessed the actual working of, the institutions and fashions, with the colour of which every line is penetrated, furnishes reasons enough why, apart from æsthetical considerations, he should be most carefully studied.

When one reflects upon the vividness and minuteness of the whole dramatic course of the composition, and compares it with the vagueness of Virgil, or the unblushing Tudor tone of Shakspeare, alike whether the plot were Roman, or British, or Plantagenet, the proposition that such must be the inference seems almost too self-evident to need proof. Yet Homer is looked on by us generally, not as a medium of the gravest political and philosophical instruction, but only as a poet. No fault can be found with the quality of the admiration paid to him. To be the chief of poets is to be the chief of writers. But he has been stinted as to quantity. The place which Herodotus holds among historians, the same in kind, but in a higher degree, is in these volumes challenged for the bard. As the former is admired and loved as the teacher, both of words and things, so the latter deserves to be reverenced, not merely for the sentiments he awakens, but also for the new facts he contributes to the history of humanity. To be with Virgil an author whom it is all but compulsory to take up at an examination at Oxford, which is purely one of style (and that too a distinction hardly won for him in the last few years), may well arouse Mr. Gladstone's surprise. It is not as though the alternative were between curtailing the right of the philosophers and historians of the golden age of Greece and Rome, in favour of a crowd of poets demanding a monopoly of attention for scholarship, and a moiety as narrators of facts. Not a single other poet, studied at the English universities, can claim to be regarded save as a poet. Surely, if motley legends, part truth and part fairy tale, of Tartars, and Cossacks, and Ethiopians, deserve, as undoubtedly they do, to be studied for the picturesqueness of the relation, and the chance glimpses they show us of old and

6

primitive times and peoples; if Livy's sad spoilings of simple Latin ballads rank, as of course, in the obligatory list of histories, it is standing with perverse pertinacity upon names, to exclude therefrom this primitive representation of the human race, in a form complete, distinct, and separate, with its own religion, ethics, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the stan'dard of its nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the Creator, yet mature, full, and finished in its own sense, 'after its own laws, like some masterpiece of the sculptor's 'art.' (Vol. i. pp. 6, 7.)

6

There might, possibly, have existed two objections to making Homer a regular subject of study from the historical point of view. First, the text might have been overspread with errors and doubts; and, secondly, his testimony might have been dependent upon, or controverted by, a multitude of witnesses of equal claims to authority. But neither objection does apply. The Homeric bubble schemes,' as they are aptly called, Payne Knight's, among the rest, have been long ago exploded. The facts of the case, it is forcibly urged, are that the poet was reverenced as the great teacher even in the pre-historic times, as in the days from Solon down to Alexander; that prizes were bestowed on those who could rehearse him most faithfully; and finally, that Pisistratus might have fixed the order of the books, but certainly did not compile them. And if it be so, what more solid reason, it is asked, can be discovered for doubting the loyalty of the earlier time, in guarding and transmitting the text in its integrity, than would apply against the later too? Not only do the very obelor of Aristarchus leave the mass of the poems untouched by a doubt, but we have Lucian's evidence that, in the sceptical age of the Ptolemies itself, a party firmly held to the faith that the stigmatized verses were themselves all genuine. But the most satisfactory testimony of all, is that of the version itself. Interpolations and intrusive glosses must have been self-confuted by a crowd of petty inconsistencies. And, as there are no domestic traitors lurking in the text itself against his authority, so, as a depositary of the history of his own times, he stands by himself without a rival, or even, with the exception of Hesiod, a single companion. If all the fables of the Cyclic poets, and that maze of genealogies, with their numberless links in the chain connecting the human hero with the god-parent of his line, which Mr. Grote so sagaciously interprets as a result, not of a a result, not of a craving after the pride of ancestry, but rather of a humble awe of approaching heaven too closely; if all these were to be treated as on an equal footing with the Homeric traditions, every student, to handle the investigation, must have the acuteness and patience of a Niebuhr.

But the credibility of the other legends is not even homogeneous with Homer's. The mass of them had been filtered through the corruptions of the tastes and sentiments of a later age; many had been patched together from several different sources; some are the apparent offspring of national vanity. Only a very few have been embodied and kept entire in the works of men like Herodotus and Thucydides, scrupulous registrars of antiquity, though hardly antiquarians; and even these, before they came into their hands, adulterated by the chance fatherings of four or five hundred years. Whatever authority supplementary tales about Homeric events and heroes may have, must depend entirely upon their harmony with the evidence of Homer himself. They can then only be admitted to illustrate him, when they have first proved their parentage from the same sources with those from which he drew (as Theseus did his), by producing the secret tokens which the great poet himself may recognise.

Mr. Gladstone, after arguing the point of Homer's right to rank as an historian, proceeds to convert his evidence to the practical purpose of elucidating various points in early Greek history; and so, by a justifiable process of reasoning in a circle, to demonstrate the grave utility of an hypothesis from which flow such results. Commencing with a denial of Mr. Grote's right to prejudge the subject, as though the character, political and social, the arts and the institutions which we discover in the Hellenic race, at the opening of what is held to be their historic era, were an ultimate fact, the highest at which we can arrive, he sets forth what are the contributions, few indeed, but never faint or obscure, which Homer brings to the attempt to decompose and analyse that wondrous Greek people and its earlier ages into their constituents and creative agencies. He himself, and his genius, it is asserted, were Hellenic, with that largeness and unimpaired universality of type' which belongs to human character as drawn by him, and especially to his Achilles and Ulysses, each master in his own province, greatest of warriors and statesmen, and each unlike the other, though concerned with the same subject-matter; one supreme in the battle-field, the other in the ambuscade; one the most impassioned of orators, the other the most persuasive; the one glowing in the flower of youth, the other in the maturity of middle age,—both together demonstrating that all the materials of Grecian greatness were in their poet's time fully ripened.' From his Hellenic blood would come the passion for the chase, and the justling of chariots in the field; and from the same, the enthusiasm for maritime enterprise and adventures, and the burning curiosity, akin to the Phoenician spirit, but with a much less dominant