And most of all, the passage which he has directly carried off from
Homer, and corrupted it on his way (Æn. i. 104):
Ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis
Scuta virûm galeasque et fortia corpora volvit.
And why all this? Plainly, I apprehend, because, while Scamander was
a word disqualified from entering into the Latin hexameter, Xanthus
also was somewhat less convenient than Simois for the march of his
resounding verse. Now this is a sample in small things of what Virgil
has done in nearly all things, both small and great.
~_Νεκυΐα of Homer and Virgil._~
There are instances in which Virgil is popularly thought to profit
by the comparison with Homer, and where, notwithstanding, a full
consideration may lead to a reversal of the sentence. The νεκυΐα of
the Eleventh Odyssey, for example, is thought inferior to that of the
Sixth Æneid. To bring them fairly together, we should perhaps put out
of view the philosophical and prophetical part of the latter[895]; but
whether we do it or not is little material in the comparison. In either
way, the _Inferno_ of Virgil is, upon the whole, a stage procession of
stately and gorgeous figures; but it has no consistent or veracious
relation to any idea of the future or unseen state actually operative
among mankind. Yet there existed such an idea, at least in the times
of which Virgil was treating, if not at the period when he lived. It
was surely a subject of the deepest interest, and of the most solemn
pathos. What we are as men here depends very much on our conception
of what we are hereafter to be. There is nothing more touching in all
the history of the race of Adam, than its blind and painful feeling
after a future still invisible. There is no witness to the comparative
degradation of a race or age, so sure as its having ceased to yearn
towards any thing beyond the grave. Homer has shown us in the Eleventh
Odyssey[896], that, together with his keen sense of the present and
visible, he felt the full force of this mysterious drawing towards the
unseen. He is plainly as much in earnest here, as in any part of the
poems. Virgil, on the other hand, succeeds in investing his hell with
almost unequalled pomp, approximating at times to splendour. Homer
attempts nothing of the kind; but he produces a perfect and profound
impression of those regions, according to the idea in his own mind:
they are shadowy, gloomy, cold, above all, and in one word, dismal.
Virgil contrives to leave the reader convinced that _he_ is a very
great artist: Homer lets all such matters take care of themselves.
But while Virgil creates no impression at all on the mind as to the
World of Shades, no image of the timid, vague, and dim belief that
was entertained respecting it, Homer has set it all before us with a
truthfulness never equalled or approached. And yet Virgil abounds in
details and measurements which Homer avoids. Tartarus is twice as deep
as the distance from earth to sky[897], and the Hydra has fifty mouths.
Yet the details of the one give no impression of reality, while the
utter local vagueness and dreaminess of the other is far more definite
in its effect, because it is made to minister to the appropriate
ideas of sadness, sympathy, and awe. As to particular passages, the
appearance of Dido is full of grandeur; but her silence, the basis of
it, is borrowed from that of Ajax; while in the Odyssey the striding of
Achilles in silence over the meadow of asphodel, when he swells with
exultation upon hearing that his son excelled in council and in war, is
perhaps one of the most sublime pieces of human representation, which
Homer himself ever has produced.
[895] Æn. vi. 724-893.
[896] We cannot safely assume the second Νεκυΐα of Od. xxiv. to be free
from interpolations.
[897] Homer has used this figure; but in an entirely different
connection, Il. viii. 13-16.
~_Ethnological dislocations._~
Let us now give an instance of Virgil’s utter indifference to historic
truth and consistency. It is the more remarkable, because as he was
pretending to derive the Julian family from the stock of Æneas, there
would apparently have been some advantage in adhering strictly to the
Homeric distinctions as to races on both sides in the Trojan war. But
this appears to be entirely beneath his attention. For instance, he
calls the Homeric Greeks Pelasgi[898]. It may be said he was guided by
the Italian traditions, which connected the Greek and Pelasgian names
as early colonists of that country. But first, some regard should be
paid to Homer in matters which concern Troy; and it is rather violent
to call the Greeks Pelasgi, when the only Pelasgi named in the war by
the Poet are placed on the side of their enemies. Secondly, as it was
his purpose throughout to depress the Greeks, why should he thus thrust
them into view as one with an Italian race? Above all, why do this
in a case, where Homer had himself supplied a link between Italy and
Troy? Again, Virgil calls the Greek camp _Dorica_ castra[899]. But the
Dorians at the period of the Trojan war were utterly insignificant, and
are never once named by Homer in connection with the contest. Again,
Virgil calls Diomed, and the city of Arpi founded by him, Ætolian, and
makes him complain that he was not allowed to go back to Calydon[900],
simply because his father Tydeus, as a son of Œneus, had been of
Ætolian extraction; though he commanded the Argives, and had nothing
whatever to do with the Ætolians of Homer. Again, following a late and
purposeless tradition, he calls Ulysses Æolides[901], though Homer
has given the descent of Ulysses[902] without in any manner attaching
it to the line of the Æolids, a collection of families whose descent,
on account probably of their historical importance, he is more than
ordinarily careful to mark.
[898] Æn. vi. 503.
[899] Æn. ii. 27. vi. 88.
[900] Æn. xi. 239-270.
[901] Æn. vi. 529.
[902] Od. xvi. 118.
With cases of simple inaccuracy, to which I do not seek to attach undue
weight, we may connect the manner in which he confounds, on the other
side, the distinctions of the Trojan races, so accurately marked by
Homer. In the Twentieth Iliad, the genealogy of the reigning families
of Troy and of Dardania is given with great precision. The distinction
between Trojans and Dardanians is preserved through the Iliad, though
the Trojan name is sometimes, but rarely, used to include the whole
indigenous army, and sometimes it even signifies the entire force,
including the allies, which opposed the Greek army. We might here,
however, suppose that it would have been in the interest of Virgil’s
aim to maintain, or even sharpen, the distinction between the Dardanian
line, which was at most but indirectly worsted by the Greeks, and the
line of Ilus, which fatally both sinned and suffered in the conflict of
the _Troica_. But, on the contrary, he is still less discriminating in
the use of names here, than he has been for the Greeks. The companions
of Æneas are sometimes Teucri, Trojani, or Trojugenæ--sometimes
Æneadæ, sometimes Dardanidæ. In the first of these names he entirely
contravenes Homer, who produces a Teucer eminent among the Greeks,
but nowhere connects the name with Troy, while Virgil makes a Cretan
Teucer[903] the founder of the Trojan race. I grant that he here
founds himself upon what may be called a separate tradition, though
it is vague and slender, of a Teucrian race in Troas. In the two last
appellations, without any authority, he wholly alters the effect of
the Greek patronymic, and changes the mere family-name into a national
appellation. Then again they appear as the Pergamea gens[904]. But
Pergamus in Homer was simply the citadel of Troy, and is a correlative
to πύργος[905]: the English might almost as well be called the people
of the Tower. Not content yet, he will also have the Trojans to be
Phryges:
[903] Æn. iii. 104.
[904] Æn. vi. 63.
[905] Scott and Liddell, in voc.
Phrygibusque adsis pede, diva, secundo[906];
[906] Æn. x. 255. Cf. i. 618, Phrygius Simois; vii. 597, _et alibi_.
though in Homer the Phrygians are a people both ethnologically and
politically separate[907] from the Trojan races. Again as to Æneas
himself. He is called Rhæteius heros[908]; but if Virgil chose thus
to designate his hero by reference to a single point of the Trojan
territory, it should have been one with which he was locally connected,
whereas the dominions of his family were not near the promontory
or upon the coast, but among the hills at the other extreme of the
country. Then again Æneas is Laomedontius heros[909]; but Laomedon was
of the branch of Ilus, while Æneas belonged to that of Assaracus; and
was moreover perjured, while the line of Assaracus was marked with no
such taint. So we have again--
[907] Il. iii. 184.
[908] Il. xii. 436.
[909] Il. viii. 18.
Dardanus, Iliacæ primus pater urbis et auctor[910];
[910] Ibid. 134. Cf. vi. 650.
but Dardanus founded Dardania, while Ilium did not exist until the time
of his great grandson Ilus. And here Virgil seems wholly to forget that
he had himself made Teucer the head of the race[911]. In describing the
migration of this hero from Crete to Troas, he says:
[911] Æn. iii. 104.
Nondum Ilium et arces
Pergameæ steterant; habitabant vallibus imis[912].
[912] Æn. iii. 109.
Here he not only rejects Homer, who places Dardanus and the original
settlement among the mountains, but likewise represents what is in
itself improbable, since eminences, and not bottoms, were commonly
sought by the first colonists with a view to security. Choosing to
depart from Homer, he does not even agree with Apollodorus[913].
Lastly, he is not less neglectful of the actual topography; for he
implies that Ilium is among the hills, while it was, according to
Homer’s express words and according to universal opinion, on the plain
as opposed to the hills. Again we have from Virgil the allusion--
[913] Apollod. III. xii. 1.
quibus obstitit Ilium, et ingens
Gloria Dardaniæ[914].
[914] Æn. vi. 63.
Here is another case of metre against history, and in all such
cases history must go (as is said) to the wall. _Ilium_ would not
satisfactorily admit the genitive case; there could therefore be no
glory of Ilium, and on this account Virgil liberally assigns vast
renown to Dardania, which was a place of no renown whatever. But he is
quite as ready, it must be admitted, to contradict himself as he is to
contradict Homer. In Æn. ii. 540, he gives it to be understood that the
city of Troy alone was the kingdom of Priam, and that the Greek camp
was beyond it, for he makes Priam say of his return from the camp,
meque in mea regna remisit.
But a very little further on he calls Priam (v. 556),
tot quondam populis regnisque superbum
Regnatorem Asiæ.
Each account is alike inaccurate: Priam had more than a city, but his
dominions were confined to a mere nook of Asia Minor. And again, before
quitting this part of the subject, let us observe how, in the case of
Anchises, he departs from Homer, even where it would have served the
purpose of his story to follow him closely. The Anchises of Homer is
an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν; he does not appear at Troy among the δημογέροντες of
the city, or of Priam’s court, which would have made him a secondary
figure; he resides at Dardania as an independent sovereign, and it
seems not unlikely that in lineal dignity, at least, he was even before
Priam. But the Anchises of Virgil is resident in Troy[915]; and is
therefore, of course, to be taken for a subject of Priam. Here the
alteration very much lowers the rank of Æneas, and so far, therefore,
of Augustus.
[915] Æn. ii. 634.
The effect of all this is, without any real gain either moral or
poetical, entirely to bewilder the mind of the reader of the Æneid, in
regard to a subject of real interest both historical and ethnological,
with respect to which Homer has left on record a most careful and
clear representation. It must indeed be admitted, that the intervening
poets had set many examples of similar license; indeed they had made
irregularity a rule; but they had no such powerful reasons as Virgil
had for imitating, in some points at least, the precision of Homer, and
besides, he has perhaps exceeded them all in the multitude and variety
of his departures from it. On the other hand, some allowance, I admit,
should be made for the less flexible character of the Latin tongue,
which might have made the peculiar accuracy of Homer a real difficulty
to Virgil.
I have thus minutely traced out this course of inconsistency and
contradiction in particular instances, because they are highly
illustrative of the character of Virgil’s work, if not of his mind.
After the political and courtly idea of the poem, he seems to have
abandoned all solicitude except for its form and sound, and to have
been totally indifferent as to presenting any veracious, or if that
word imply too much credulity, any self-consistent pattern, of manners,
places, events, or characters.
Virgil must, materially at least, have saturated himself with the Iliad
before he planned the Æneid, for his borrowing is alike incessant
and diversified; and this it is which renders it so singular that he
should at once have exposed himself to the double charge of servilely
imitating and of gratuitously disfiguring his original.
If we look to the action of the Twelfth Book of the Æneid, it is all
made up from Homer cut in pieces and recast. It begins with the idea of
the single combat, borrowed from the Third and Seventh Iliads. Then
come the pact and the breach of it by Juturna, under Juno’s influence,
which are borrowed from the treachery of Pandarus, prompted by Minerva,
under the same instigation. Next, the flight of Turnus before Æneas is
borrowed from that of Hector before Achilles. After this, Turnus is
disabled by a divine agency, like Patroclus before Hector; a downfall
brought about in the one case, as in the other, without peril and
without honour, so that here we have a copy even of one among the
few points where the Iliad was little worthy to be imitated. Lastly,
the thought of Pallas in the mind of Æneas (more highly wrought,
however, and very effective), plays the part of the recollection of
Patroclus[916] in the mind of Achilles.
[916] Il. xxii. 331-47.
~_Unfaithful imitations of detail._~
Both here and elsewhere, the imitations in detail are too numerous to
be noted. Some of them even descend to a character which, independently
of their minuteness, approaches the ludicrous. The very dung, in which
the Oilean Ajax loses his footing[917], in the Twenty-third Iliad,
is reproduced in the Fifth Æneid, that Nisus may flounder in it. But
even here we may note two characteristic differences. Homer trips up a
personage, whom he has no particular occasion to set off favourably.
Virgil chooses for the object of derision Nisus, on whom, in the
beautiful episode which soon after follows, he is about to concentrate
all the tenderest sympathies of his hearers. And again, Homer makes
Ajax slip where, as he says, the oxen had just been slain over
Patroclus: Virgil has no such probable cause to allege for the presence
of the obnoxious material[918], but says _cæsis forte juvencis_. Now
the Trojans had in fact left the tomb of Anchises, and had gone to a
chosen spot to celebrate the foot-races[919]; so that even his gore and
ordure are quite out of place.
[917] Il. xxiii. 775-81. Æn. v. 333, 356.
[918] Ibid. 329.
[919] Ibid. 286-90.
So again, of all the _formulæ_ in Homer, it is not very clear why
Virgil should have chosen to recall the rather commonplace line
αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδήτυος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο
in his own more ambitious and resounding verse,
Postquam exemta fames, et amor compressus edendi[920];
[920] Æn. viii. 185.
but it is still more singular that, instead of saying that hunger and
thirst were satisfied, he should leave out thirst altogether, and fill
up his hexameter by mentioning hunger twice over.
Still it seems not a little strange, notwithstanding the power of the
disabling causes which have been enumerated, that, with so vast an
amount of material imitation, Virgil should not have acquired, even by
accident or by sheer force of use, some traits of nearer resemblance in
feeling, and in ethical handling, to his great original.
His maltreatment of the Homeric characters is most conspicuous,
perhaps, in the instance of Helen. This case, indeed, deserves a
separate consideration of the causes which have reduced a beautiful,
touching, and remarkably original portrait to a gross and most common
caricature. But Ulysses, as the prince of policy, had perhaps a better
claim to be comprehended by a Roman at the court of Augustus. Yet
the Ulysses of Virgil simply represents the naked ideas of hardness,
cunning, and cruelty. He is never named but to be abused; and, though
the mention of him is not very frequent, it is easy to construct from
the poem a pretty large catalogue of vituperative epithets, unmitigated
by any single one of an opposite character. He is _durus_, _dirus_,
_sævus_, _pellax_, _fandi fictor_, _artifex_, _inventor scelerum_, and
_scelerum hortator_. Even physical circumstances, however, and those
too of the broadest notoriety, Virgil entirely overlooks. Nothing can
be more at variance with the effeminate character of the Homeric Paris,
his impotence in fight, and his distinction limited to the bow, which
was then the coward’s weapon, than to represent him as possessed of
vast physical force. Yet even on this Virgil has ventured. In the games
of the Fifth Book, when Æneas invites candidates for the pugilistic
encounter, the huge Dares immediately presents himself, and he is
described as the only person who could box with Paris[921]!
[921] Æn. v. 370.
Solus qui Paridem solitus contendere contra.
Heyne urges by way of apology the authority of Hyginus, who was no
more than the contemporary of Virgil himself; and presumes that
Virgil followed authorities now lost: a sorry defence, because the
representation is inconsistent not merely with the facts, but with the
essential idea of the Paris of Homer, and therefore proves that Virgil
did not try or care to understand the character, or to be faithful to
his master.
~_Maltreatment of Mythology and Ethics._~
But it is time to give some instances, which show an utter disregard of
either mythological or moral consistency.
In the Eighth Æneid, Æneas and Anchises are much troubled in mind; and
so it appears they must have continued,
Nî signum cœlo Cytherea dedisset aperto;
Namque improviso vibratus ab æthere fulgor
Cum sonitu venit[922].
[922] Æn. viii. 523.
This idea of a _Cytherea tonans_ is as incongruous as it is novel.
To preserve the characteristic attributes of the several deities of
the Pagan mythology contributes to beauty, and was therefore at least
an obligation imposed by the poetic art; but Virgil is not content
with simply departing from it by taking the management of thunder
and lightning out of the hands of Jupiter and the highest deities;
he cannot be satisfied without giving it to Venus. With her Homeric
character, and with any consistent conception of her attributes, it is
utterly irreconcilable.
But again, in the Second Æneid, Virgil makes Venus address to her son
the following majestic lines, when he was about to slay Helen amidst
the conflagration of Troy:
Non tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa Lacænæ
Culpatusve Paris: Divûm inclementia, Divûm
Has evertit opes, sternitque a culmine Trojam[923].
[923] Æn. ii. 601.
In which he plainly imitates the words of Priam,
οὔτι μοι αἰτίη ἐσσὶ, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν,
οἵ μοι ἐφώρμησαν πόλεμον πολύδακρυν Ἀχαιῶν[924].
[924] Il. iii. 164.
Now, even with reference to the acquittal of Helen, the cases are
quite dissimilar. What Homer puts into the mouth of Priam, Virgil
stamps with the authority of a deity: what Priam says of the Homeric
Helen, who had been carried off by Paris, and whose general character
was very far from depraved, the Venus of Virgil says of a hardened
traitress as well as adulteress. Again, what Priam says relative to
himself, ‘_I_ do not blame thee,’ seems in the Æneid to resemble the
unlimited enunciation of an abstract proposition. But, above all, let
us notice how lamentably Virgil has mauled the sentiment by introducing
Paris into the passage, of whose moral guilt, if there be such a thing
as moral guilt upon earth, there could be no doubt, and whom Homer,
with true poetic justice, has taken care to punish by making him the
object of the general reprobation and hatred of his countrymen[925].
In acquitting such an offender, and throwing the charge of his crimes
upon the Immortals, by the mouth, too, of one belonging to their
number, Virgil has given into the worst form of fatalism, that namely
which annihilates all moral sanctions and ideas as applicable to human
conduct.
[925] Il. iii. 453, and elsewhere.
And this he has done with no plea whatever which might have been
drawn, _valeat quantum_, from the exigencies of his poem. Paris was
not before the eye of Æneas: Venus was not dissuading her son from
taking vengeance upon Paris; he is forced into our sight; the allusion
is as irrelevant with reference to the purpose of the passage, as it
is blameworthy in an ethical point of view; and in all probability the
mention of him is introduced for no other reason than that it supplied
Virgil with a hemistich to fill up a gap in an extremely fine passage,
and to secure its prosodial equilibrium, to which the balance of moral
sanctions is sacrificed without remorse.
As it is with the management of his gods, so with his conception
of human nature; Virgil seems to have lost the sight of its higher
prerogatives, and especially of the great and noble truth, that it
is susceptible of divine influences without the loss of its free
agency. The poems of Homer, notwithstanding their copious theurgy, are
throughout eminently and entirely human. Their human agency is adorned
and elevated (as well as unhappily lowered and darkened), it is even
modified and controlled, but never inwardly mutilated, curtailed or
superseded, by the interference of the Immortals. But, in regard to his
relations with the deities, Æneas is a mere puppet; and the gallant
spirit of Turnus on his last battlefield is, as it were, put down
within him by main force from heaven.
~_Æneas and Dido in the Shades._~
Thus for example, Virgil is not ashamed to introduce to us Æneas in
the shades below apologizing to Dido for his black desertion of her by
saying, ‘he could not help it, the gods compelled him; and really he
never thought she would take it so much to heart.’
Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi;
Sed me jussa deûm ...
Imperiis egere suis; nec credere quivi
Hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem[926].
[926] Æn. vi. 460.
Compare with this the extraordinary truth, beauty, and manfulness of
the speech, in which Ulysses takes his farewell of Calypso[927]. This
is its tenour: ‘Be not incensed; I know Penelope is less beautiful
than thou; yet is my desire, from day by day, towards my home; and
if I be wrecked upon my way, this too I will endure, even as I have
endured much before.’ In Virgil’s hands, the chief would probably
have shuffled off the responsibility from himself upon the shoulders
of the gods. Never shall we find one of Homer’s heroes doing this,
either beforehand, as by saying, ‘I do not wish to do it, but I am
ordered,’ or retrospectively. There is one exception; it is when
Agamemnon says that Ἄτη, the goddess of Mischief, with Jupiter, had
misled him[928], and that he was not himself to blame. But Agamemnon,
alone among the Greek heroes, had in his character a strong element
of what we call shabbiness; and what is more, he uses this plea only
after making reparation, and not, as Æneas does, in lieu of any. To
resume, however, the thread. Sometimes the Homeric heroes are pious,
sometimes disobedient; sometimes bold, and sometimes fearful; sometimes
they submit to overpowering force, sometimes they struggle even against
destiny; but they never appear before us shorn of the first attribute
of manhood, its free will.
[927] Od. v. 215-24.
[928] Il. xix. 86. When Achilles (270) as it were countersigns this, it
is evidently in his character of a high-bred gentleman; a character, of
which he gives so many proofs in the poem.
It seems then that Virgil really did not care to form the habit, and
thus commonly failed in the power, of working the higher springs of
our nature. He puts the clay into the fire, but the pitcher does not
always come out such as he intended it; not even when, instead of
trusting, like Homer, to simple action as the vehicle of his meaning,
he uses the precautionary measure of describing it.
Thus he prepares us to expect in Mezentius a monster of impiety,
cruelty, and brutality, from the account and the epithets by which
he is introduced to us[929]. In words scattered here and there, this
‘contemptor divûm’ is made to sustain his impious character. _Dextra
mihi deus_, he says; and again _nec divûm parcimus ulli_[930]. But
these are really mere black patches, set upon a character with which
they do not accord; they remain patches still, and not parts of it.
Practically, Mezentius proceeds in the poem only as an affectionate
father, and as a gallant warrior, should do; and there is no more of
real impiety in him, than there is of real piety in Æneas. Nay, here
again Virgil shows his contempt of consistency. For, when Mezentius
slays Orodes, who prophesied that his conqueror would meet with a
similar fate upon the field of battle, Mezentius replies in the most
decorous manner (copying the very language of Achilles to the dying
Hector[931]),
[929] Æn. vii. 648; viii. 7, 482.
[930] Æn. x. 773, 880.
[931] Il. xxii. 365.
Nunc morere. Ast de me divûm pater atque hominum rex
Viderit[932].
[932] Æn. x. 743.
~_Woman characters of Homer and Virgil._~
Though Virgil is esteemed a woman-hater, he has availed himself of
the use of female characters to a degree only exceeded, so far as I
recollect, by the highly susceptible Tasso. His celestial machinery is
principally worked by Juno and by Venus: we miss altogether in him that
jovial might of the Homeric Jupiter, which is recalled in the historic
portraits of king Henry the Eighth of England. Of mortals we have,
besides the mute Lavinia, and minor or transitory personages, Dido,
Juturna, Amata, Camilla. All these play very marked parts in the poem;
indeed, they supply the mainsprings of the action; and the characters
of all are drawn with great spirit and success, while the Passion of
Dido will probably always be quoted as the most magnificent witness,
which the whole range of the poem affords, to the original power and
genius of its author. Yet even in these, his signal successes, it is
curious to notice the dissimilarity between Virgil and Homer. Homer,
too, has been eminently successful in his women. His greater studies of
Helen, Andromache, and Penelope are fully sustained by the truth and
force of all the less conspicuous delineations: Hecuba, Briseis, the
incomparable Nausicaa, the faithful Euryclea, the pert and heartless
Melantho. But how different are the works of the two poets! In all
Virgil’s women (as on the other hand his men are apt to be effeminate)
there is a tinge of the masculine. Many a woman would stab herself for
love like Dido; but none, not even in France, with her pomp, apparatus,
and self-consciousness. Their fates, too, are all of a violent
character. Amata, as well as Dido, commits suicide; Camilla is slain;
Juturna is immortal indeed, but is dismissed from earth with what for
her comes nearest to an image of death; with defeat, mortification,
shame. But on the contrary, the feminineness of Homer’s women has never
been surpassed. In Hecuba alone, at one single point in the story,
there is an apparent exception; yet it is no great violence done to
nature, if we find in her after Hector’s death the wild ferocity of
the dam deprived of her offspring, and if revenge then drives her for
a moment into the temper of a cannibal. Elsewhere beyond doubt, even
in Melantho, the feminine character is not wholly obliterated, but is
left at the point where in actual life licentiousness and vanity might
leave it. In Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa, it reaches a perfection which
has never been surpassed, unless by Shakespeare, in human song. There
is, however, something to be observed, which is more striking and
characteristic. The Virgilian delineations of women tell us absolutely
nothing, or next to nothing, of the social position of womankind either
at the epoch of Æneas or at any other; a matter which has stood so
differently in different ages and states of mankind, yet which has at
all times been one of the surest tests for distinguishing a true and
healthy from a hollow civilization. But the Homeric poems furnish a
picture of this interesting subject not a whit less complete than any
other picture they contain. The Woman of the heroic age of Greece
stands before us in that immortal verse no less clear, no less truly
drawn, no less carefully shaded, than the Warrior, the Statesman, and
the King.
These are great matters: but Virgil is also as careless, as Homer is
careful, of minor proprieties. For instance, he describes the Italian
smiths engaged in preparing suits of armour upon the invasion of Æneas.
Some, he says, make breastplates of brass; and he continues,
Aut leves ocreas lento ducunt argento[933].
[933] Æn. vii. 633.
Here, we presume, his purpose was to represent the hammering process by
a heavy spondaic line--in evident imitation of Homer, who has done it
still more completely in the
θώρηκας ῥήξειν δηΐων ἀμφὶ στήθεσσιν[934].
[934] Il. ii. 544.
But Homer always gains his metrical objects without injuring the sense;
Virgil, on the contrary, has committed an error, by representing silver
(a most rare and valuable metal, especially in the Trojan times)
as used in large masses for making armour; and a grosser solecism,
by representing the greaves as made of far finer material than the
breastplates. Perhaps he was helped into this error by a careless
reminiscence, that Homer had in some way connected silver with the
greaves. This is not, however, in armour as generally used, but in the
case of some of the greatest chiefs, including Paris, whose dandyism,
we know, extended particularly to his arms. Nor are even his greaves
made of, or even plated with, silver, but only the clasps of them:
κνημῖδας μὲν πρῶτα περὶ κνήμῃσιν ἔθηκεν
καλὰς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας[935].
[935] Il. iii. 330.
Virgil is careful enough as to geography, when he deals with countries
under the eye of his hearers. But he can scarcely be excused for
inverting the Homeric order of the mountains piled up by the giants.
Homer places Mount Pelion on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus:
Ὄσσαν ἐπ’ Οὐλύμπῳ μέμασαν θέμεν, αὐτὰρ ἐπ’ Ὄσσῃ
Πήλιον εἰνοσίφυλλον[936].
[936] Od. xi. 315.
This description is in conformity with the proportionate heights of
the mountains, among which Olympus is the highest, Ossa the next,
Pelion the least. But Virgil makes Pelion the base, and Olympus the
_apex_:
Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam
Scilicet, atque Ossæ frondosum involvere Olympum[937].
[937] Georg. i. 281.
It is not simply that Homer is here geographically accurate, and Virgil
the reverse. Homer has adopted the pyramidal structure, which satisfies
the eye, and lays a firm and obvious road, so to speak, to the skies.
Virgil does not. He subjoins to his description the verse,
Ter pater extructos disjecit fulmine montes.
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 these[938];
[938] Æn. iv. 248-51.
Atlantis, cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris
Piniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri;
Nix humeros infusa tegit: tum flumina mento
Præcipitant 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 Phœnix[939], and Phœnix commands the fifth division of
the Myrmidons: they are named by Virgil as a separate race[940]. 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 Minos[941] 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 earth[942].
Again, where Homer uses exaggeration to enhance effect, Virgil carries
it far into caricature. In the Iliad, Diomed[943] 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 hold[944]. 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
Jupiter[945]. Now in the Fifth Æneid, Æneas gives to Mnestheus, as a
prize, a breastplate which he himself had won, the spoil of Demoleos.
This Demoleos[946] 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.
[939] Il. ix. 484, and xvi. 196.
[940] Æn. ii. 7.
[941] Æn. vi. 432.
[942] Although it may be a deviation from the direct path, yet, having
noticed in so much detail the unfaithfulness of Virgil to his original,
I will also give an instance of the accuracy of Horace. In the Seventh
Ode of the First Book, he has occasion to refer to the places made
famous in Homeric song; and Athens with him is Palladis urbs; so Argos
(ἱππόβοτον) is _aptum equis_, Mycænæ (πολύχρυσος) _dites_, Larissa
(ἐριβώλαξ) _opima_. Lacedæmon is _patiens_, an epithet corresponding
with no particular word in Homer, but not contradicted by any; it had
acquired the character since his time.
[943] Il. v. 303. See also Il. xx. 285.
[944] Il. xii. 382.
[945] Ibid. 445-50.
[946] Homer names a Demoleon, son of Agenor; but he is slain fighting
for the Trojans. Il. xx. 395.
‘Vix illam famuli Phegeus Sagarisque ferebant
Multiplicem, connixi humeris[947].’
[947] Æn. vi. 233.
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 hearers[948]. 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:
[948] The aim of the poet as such is finely, but somewhat too
exclusively, expressed in the Sonnet of Filicaja, _Dietro a questi
ancor io_.
ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδὸν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων[949]·
[949] Od. xvii. 385.
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 ἀνάγκῃ[950].
[950] Od. xxii. 331.
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 stead[951]. 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.
[951] Od. iii. 267.
~_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 him[952] _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 estimation[953]. 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.
[952] De Civ. Dei, i. 3.
[953] Ibid. viii. 4-11.
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 grosse
Spiega l’ antenne sue ligura nave[954].
[954] Gerus. xix. 36.
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 morte[955].
[955] Ibid. 37.
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) high[956]. 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.
[956] Od. xi. 311.
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 colle[957].
[957] Gerus. iv. 6.
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 it[958].’
[958] Hallam’s Literature of Europe, ii. 268.
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 Ariosto[959]. 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.
[959] Lett. Ital., vol. vii.
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.
It may therefore be true, as Mr. Hallam has said, that the events
in Tasso spring naturally one from another; but so may a series of
successive turnings off the line of a road we have been travelling,
when taken singly, produce no serious, and even no sensible, deviation;
yet their effect, when taken together, may be wholly to change our
direction, and prevent us from making any way at all towards our point.
Without doubt, each incident of an epic poem ought to follow naturally
in the train of that which directly precedes it; but it is far more
important that it should bear a legitimate relation to the central
design, and should magnify, not detract from, the grandeur of that on
which the whole fabric principally depends.
But there are surely many other objections to the mode, which Tasso
has adopted, of impeding and retarding the accomplishment of his main
action. Considering the nature of his theme, and the solemnity of the
sanctions under which the Crusades were undertaken, although we have
no right to ask that passion and infirmity should be banished from the
camp, yet the wholesale entanglement of the very first warriors in
love affairs, their rushing in a mass, with few exceptions besides
greyheads of the camp, upon the track of Armida, their compelling
Godfrey to allow the interests of this treacherous beauty to interrupt
the august purpose of their undertaking, and then the very large
proportion of the poem occupied in unravelling the web thus tangled,
form, to my view at least, a bad poetical mixture of the intrusive with
the Christian elements of the design.
Nor let it here be said, that even so our great Achilles stays the
progress of the Greeks towards triumph for the love of a weak woman.
We need not dwell on such distinctions as that Briseis was a noble and
worthy, but Armida an unworthy object of attachment; that Achilles was
but one, while Tasso touches all, who by age were capable, with the
same phrensy. It is not even this worthy attachment alone, that acts
upon Achilles: that is not the main stress of the tempest which so
rends the strong heaving oak when he cries,
ἀλλά μοι οἰδάνεται κραδίη χόλῳ, ὁππότ’ ἐκείνων
μνήσομαι, ὥς μ’ ἀσύφηλον ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἔρεξεν
Ἀτρείδης, ὡσεί τιν’ ἀτίμητον μετανάστην[960].
[960] Il. ix. 646.
In Achilles, baffled love is surmounted by the image of agonizing
pride, pierced through and through; and high over this again towers
his hatred of the meanness of Agamemnon, and his sense of Justice,
stung to the very inmost quick. Even supposing the question to be open,
whether Homer has mixed his ingredients in due or in undue proportions,
at all events there is no essential conflict among them. But such a
conflict becomes visible and glaring, when a scope is assigned to the
impulses and sway of personal passion upon an army devoted to God and
to the highest aim, such as it is quite impossible to exemplify, nay to
suppose, in any army that has ever been banded together for any even of
the meaner ends of earthly policy.
Again, although Tasso’s poem is eminently Christian in its general
intention, who does not feel that, instead of gathering our main
sympathies and interest by means of his accessory circumstances round
his principal subject, he has too effectually severed them from it,
and has left it so bare and naked, that his liberation of Jerusalem
is after all very like a common capture and sack; very like what,
_mutatis mutandis_, the capture of it by the Saracens must have been?
We leave him with our minds full of Tancredi and Clorinda, of Rinaldo
and Armida, of Gildippe and Odoardo; but the associations, which these
names suggest, connect themselves with any subject, rather than with
the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre; and the respected Godfrey, with
his plans, has, at most points of the poem, little more share in our
thoughts than the Jupiter of the Iliad, as he feasts remotely grand on
Olympus, or sits on Ida for the convenience of a nearer view.
~_Relative places of Rinaldo and Tancredi._~
Besides these objections of irrelevant interpolation, incongruous
mixture, and divided interests, it may be observed that the relative
prominence of the heroes of Tasso is not clearly pronounced. No one
can doubt as to the question, who is the first, and by far the first,
figure of the Iliad. Achilles ever haunts us, either in recollection
or by sight; at any rate, he stands among and above his brother
chieftains, as Saul out-topped by head and shoulders the people of
Israel. But it is not easy to say who is the hero or protagonist of
the Jerusalem. Although the interest which he attracts is inferior,
yet the virtues, intellect, and moral force of Godfrey stand high
and clear beyond those of all the other more prominent personages:
he bears himself so meekly in his high office, and yet so perfectly
and so exclusively exhibits the political spirit, that by mere moral
and official greatness he stands, in any general view of the poem, an
inconvenient neighbour and a dangerous rival to the two other figures,
for one of whom the title of hero must have been designed. Taking,
next, the yet more serious question between Tancredi and Rinaldo, which
of this pair is intended to command the chief interest? Apparently,
in Tasso’s intention, it is Rinaldo; because without him the main
action stops, with him it proceeds. And yet the poet has assigned to
Tancredi the deadly single combat with, and the triumph so powerfully
described over, Argante, the only really great and terrible champion on
the Mahometan side. How would the Iliad stand, if Diomed had killed
Hector, and had left to Achilles only Æneas or Sarpedon?
Tasso here seems himself to have felt an incongruity, and to have
sought to compensate Rinaldo in quantity for the (comparatively)
deficient quality of his conquests. In the final assault he slays a
multitude of the enemy like sheep[961]; when, as the poet says, in a
manner surely far beneath his theme, the taste of victory had excited
in him the appetite of carnage[962].
[961] Gerus. xx. 55.
[962] Ibid. 54.
Nor is it only in the distribution of military glory, that Rinaldo
appears to have suffered for the advantage of Tancred. On one occasion
indeed, immediately after the death of Gernando, Tasso has degraded
Tancred for the advantage of Rinaldo. For the poet makes this warrior
plead, that the offence of Rinaldo should be considered according to
the quality of him who committed it, and that there can be no such
thing as true justice without respect of persons:
Or ti sovvegna
Saggio signor, chi sia Rinaldo, e quale;
... non dee chi regna
Nel castigo con tutti esser uguale.
Vario è l’ istesso error ne’ gradi vari;
E sol l’ egualità giusta è co’ pari[963].
[963] Gerus. v. 36.
It was acting on an opinion of this kind, in the case of the Master of
Stair after the Massacre of Glencoe, that left uneffaced a deep stain
on the memory of William III. and of Scotland. Doubtless there have
been periods when, even in Christian countries, such sentiments have
been professed as well as practised; but can there have been any period
when the utterance of them from the mouth of a knight, who is exhibited
to us as a pattern, would not have caused a revulsion in the minds of
ordinary hearers or readers?
~_The Woman-characters of Tasso._~
The Jerusalem is greatly overstocked with interesting couples; so much
so, that at times we almost seem to be reading a Pastoral poem. Taken
singly, the details of these love-stories are worked up with infinite
art and beauty, and are the most effective and successful portions of
the whole Epic; but the aggregate is so much too large, that it chills
the general tone, as well as weakens the broader effects. The excess
of quantity is, indeed, gross and glaring. Tasso has followed the
Christian Romancers in employing largely the idea of the woman-warrior,
practically unknown to Homer, introduced with great spirit but no very
elevated moral effect in Virgil, carried by Bojardo and Ariosto to its
perfection; and, without doubt, a conception far more suitable to the
standard of those great poets of fancy, than to the lofty level of the
Epic or the higher drama, which deal with the greatest powers and the
deepest problems of our nature. Still, as to the manner of employing
it, we need not deny that high praise must be accorded to the Clorinda
of Tasso. It is indeed easy to criticize the religious incidents of her
death, and not easy to understand what business she has after death
in a tree of the enchanted wood; or why, when that wood becomes the
prey of the carpenters, she is so unceremoniously overlooked in her
uncomfortable abode. But as to the main exhibition of the character,
she follows Bradamante without degeneracy: pure, upright, chivalrous,
thoroughly martial, and yet not grossly masculine. She falls to
the lot of Tancred. But besides the Sofronia, the Erminia, and the
Gildippe, in the second degree of prominence, there is projected on
the picture another person yet more conspicuous than even Clorinda,
namely, Armida; so different that they can hardly be compared, and yet
inconveniently jarring from the similarity of their relations to the
great heroes of the poem. Both, too, are lovely; both figure in the
camp. Notwithstanding, however, the profusion of charms, which Tasso
has called into existence to set off the person and the powers of
Armida, nothing can be more unsatisfactory than her character itself,
except its place in the poem, and her particular relation to Rinaldo.
When every one else is ravished by her overpowering attractions, he
remains insensible: and yet afterwards, with no poetical justification
for the change, he becomes desperately enamoured of her. Here we see
that feebleness in the conception and exhibition of character, which
depresses the flight of Tasso, which excludes him from a place in the
class, quite as open to poets as to philosophers, the class of the
greatest masters of thought and of human nature.
~_The Armida of Tasso._~
We become acquainted with Armida, the beautiful enchantress, first in
the guise of a forlorn damsel, who implores succour from the Christian
heroes; and this is perhaps the most successful portion of the _rôle_
assigned to her. Then she appears as the Circe of her own gardens:
then she is a Dido without an Æneas, for the escape of Rinaldo from
the disgraceful servitude into which she had inveigled him bears no
resemblance to the fond and deep passion of the Carthaginian queen,
which grew out of an honourable hospitality afforded to the Trojans in
distress. With a disagreeable amount of likeness in detail, the copy
still misses the original, and loses all that force and majesty of
intense passion to which here, and here alone, Virgil has been enabled
to ascend. Then instead of that tragic end of Dido, in which, though
with an attitude somewhat theatrical, softness and fierceness are so
wonderfully blended, so that she does not forfeit sympathy even in
her keenest longings for revenge, Armida has recourse to an expedient
which is wholly debased and vulgar. She simply offers herself for
sale, promising to be the prize of any warrior of the Egyptian camp,
who shall execute her vengeance on Rinaldo for the offence of having
escaped out of her toils.
Nor have we yet done with the doublings of her tortuous path. She sees
Rinaldo pass her in the battle; and, not without infinite doubting,
shoots an arrow at him. It is perhaps difficult to define in language
what it is, that constitutes the difference between the mental
struggles of genuine passion, and mere incongruous vacillation. We see
the former in Dido; and one sign of it is a certain progression. Where
the law of nature is followed, perpetual fluctuation is not allowed;
by degrees, though they may be slow and many, the mind is worked up to
a strong resolve, where it abides: its agitation and seeming reflux is
but the receding wave of the advancing tide; and when once a strong
purpose is full-formed after struggle in a truly powerful nature,
whether of man or woman, it must not be changed. Now this is what we
miss in Armida. She is ever playing at backwards and forwards. Thrice
she draws the bow, thrice she relaxes it: at last she discharges the
arrow, but with it a wish that it may miss:
Lo stral volò; ma con lo strale un voto
Subito uscì, che vada il colpo a voto[964].
[964] Gerus. xx. 63.
Not unnaturally, this unsatisfactory passage leads us to one of the
worst of all the provoking conceits that disfigure from time to time
the beautiful pages of this poem:
Tanto poteva in lei, benchè perdente,
(Or che potria vittorioso?) amore[965].
[965] Ib. 64.
Yet, after all this, revenge again gets the upper hand, and her eye
follows the arrow with avidity, hoping it may strike. She then repeats
the shot again and again, and while doing it is again herself shot in
return by love:
E mentre ella saetta, Amor lei piaga[966].
[966] Ib. 65.
Again the same alternation is reiterated; but her champions fail. She
flies. She resumes the part of Dido; apostrophizes her own weapons in a
speech of near thirty lines, entreating them to despatch her. Rinaldo
then arrests her arm; and yet once more, in stanzas replete with beauty
of diction, we have the same unsatisfactory and indecisive mixture of
ill-assorted emotions, without the strength either of harmony or of
contrast, founded on no natural law, connected by no moral or mental
tie, ordered to no end or consummation. However, he vows himself her
adorer, and she gives herself up to his disposal:
Ecco l’ ancella tua; d’ essa a tuo senno
Dispon, gli disse; e le fia legge il cenno[967].
[967] Ib. 136.
And so we leave them. But unhappily we cannot, in leaving them, forget
that she is a Mahometan and a sorceress; that her frauds have been the
great scandal of the army, and the main obstacle to the completion of
its design; that she has never throughout the whole poem exhibited a
single quality containing in it the elements of just moral attraction;
and that this triumph of mere corporeal form, without one solitary
note of inward loveliness, is achieved over the greatest of the
warriors of Christ, when engaged, under the immediate and special
direction of the Almighty, in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from
infidel dominion. With all these circumstances before us, it must
be admitted that a more lame and unsatisfactory contribution to the
climax of a great Christian poem could hardly have been contrived.
Nor is the impression much amended by the dedication of the eight
last stanzas of the work to the completion of the victory by Godfrey.
A reader may, on the contrary, well feel perturbed by the sharpness
of the transition, and by the air of unconsciousness with which, in
gathering up the threads of the action, Tasso has brought into close
neighbourhood matters so heterogeneous, that they form a kind of moral
chaos. And the observation applies to the close of the poem, which may
well have accompanied it throughout its course; that the sympathies of
the reader are not evoked and managed with due, or with any, reference
to the greatness and nobleness of the objects, but, on the contrary,
are allured into the wrong quarter. Homer has carefully contrived, in
the case of Paris, that even his extraordinary personal attractions
shall do nothing to give him a hold upon our favour, while he has
given his warmest sympathies to the beauty of the innocent, though
comparatively insignificant, Euphorbus[968]. How tame and flat, on
the contrary, has Tasso made the stainless Erminia, whom indeed he
altogether forgets before the poem closes; and what efforts of art has
he not used to gather admiring interest around the character and fate
of the heartless, even when enamoured, Armida. Nay, more, with some
brilliant exceptions, especially that noble one of the first view of
Jerusalem, how cold and slack, how uninteresting to the reader, is the
movement of the main action of the poem, compared with that of the
love-stories which invade and engross so inordinate a portion of the
ground. We seem to feel that, after all, the Siege of Jerusalem is not
the principal business in hand; it is the task which must somehow or
other be got through, but it is not the life and pulse, the light and
joy of the poem. As the Siege of Troy was the instrument of Homer, to
enable him to develop his Achilles, so the much higher subject of the
Crusade is the tool of Tasso to enable him to exhibit his workmanship,
chiefly in connection with love-stories, upon very inferior persons
and performances. The relative values of the setting and the jewel are
totally different in the two cases.
[968] Il. xvii. 51.
~_The affront of Gernando._~
Besides the first great hindrance to the prosecution of the siege
in the seductive power of Armida when she appears in the camp,
there is a second, namely, the slaughter of Gernando by Rinaldo,
upon a personal affront. It has here been objected to the first,
that the effect assigned to it is out of proportion to all example
and to all likelihood, though it may be suitable to the passionate
susceptibilities of Tasso’s individual mind; and that this
disproportion jars peculiarly from the more than usual elevation of the
subject. Is the second obstacle more happily conceived?
Rinaldo, in the Fifth Canto, unlike his companions, has proved
impregnable to the assaults of Armida’s mingled beauty and art:
Ma perch’ a lui colpi d’ amor più lenti
Non hanno il petto oltra la scorza inciso,
Nè molto impaziente è di rivale,
Nè la donzella di seguir gli cale[969].
[969] Gerus. v. 12.
He rather aspires to succeed to the fallen Dudone in the immediate
command of the forces. Yet even with respect to this, his ambition
purports to be under the guidance of high principle:
I gradi primi
Più meritar che conseguir desio[970].
[970] Ibid. 151.
Presently the Norwegian Prince Gernando, moved by jealousy, insults
him; on which Rinaldo there and then gives him the lie, and slays him.
It is hardly possible to measure the inferiority of this combination,
as respects poetic art and effect, to the scene of the First Book of
the Iliad, with which it must naturally be compared: where Achilles
is stung, and stung at once in every fibre of his deep, proud, and
impassioned nature, by the mingled meanness and tyranny of Agamemnon.
The affront in Homer is so contrived that it shall contain all
the highest elements of provocation: avarice, tyranny, injustice,
ingratitude, on the one side are made to exacerbate the wounds
inflicted by public degradation, and by the sudden loss of a beloved
object, on the other. But the insult of Gernando to Rinaldo is an
every-day insult of the streets: yet an American duellist could not
have been more summary in his proceedings, than is the great Christian
champion. The brutal provocation instantly breaks down both the piety
and the moral firmness of Rinaldo. It is not so with Achilles. In him
there is a conscious force of self-command, which absolutely, though
not relatively to his passion, is even beyond that of other men; and
though unequal, indeed, yet is all but not unequal to controlling that
tempestuous flood of wrath. Nothing can be grander than the picture of
this his first great mental convulsion. We must quote the lines:
ὣς φάτο· Πηλείωνι δ’ ἄχος γένετ’, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορ
στήθεσσιν λασίοισι διάνδιχα μερμήριξεν,
ἢ ὅγε φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ
τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὁ δ’ Ἀτρείδην ἐναρίζοι,
ἠὲ χόλον παύσειεν, ἐρητύσειέ τε θυμόν[971].
[971] Il. i. 188.
Then, while the strong current eddies to and fro within him, and while
his fingers, playing instinctively on the handle of his sword, cause
its blade to be seen, comes the warning vision of Pallas to him, and to
him alone. This admonition restores the disturbed balance of his mind;
and, his inward wound assuaged with the promise of a future revenge, to
be wrought out for him by the self-condemning hands of the inflicters
and abettors of the wrong, he moodily foregoes the reckoning of blood.
Such is the solid, the Cyclopian structure of the fabric, into which
Homer has built his characters. Had the hero of Tasso indeed been
endowed with a sublimity of passion beyond or like that of Achilles, we
might not have been entitled to call him strictly to account for the
slaughter of Gernando. But the truth is, that he is a somewhat jejune
and feeble character; and his offence in this instance is not from
the excess of the impelling, but from the defect, or rather the utter
absence, of the restraining power.
Gioberti, in a posthumous work[972], remarks that the heroes of
Paganism are more effective than those of Christianity, because the
standard by which they are measured is lower, the idea imperfect
instead of perfect. There is, I believe, much both of truth and of
depth in this observation. It is no more than justice that Tasso should
have the benefit of it, which is not inconsiderable.
[972] _La Riforma Cattolica_, lately published at Turin, with an
excellent preface by Massari.
~_Differing modes of describing personages._~
Such, however, as his heroes are, he takes the precaution to describe
them in outline at a very early stage indeed of his proceedings,
namely, in the stanzas 8-10 of the First Canto. He here places before
us Godfrey, Baldwin, Tancred, Boemondo, and Rinaldo; and he resumes
from time to time the business of describing them. Bojardo and
Ariosto avoid this; but it is probably because they were dealing with
characters of well-known type, already familiar to their audience.
Homer, who drew so much more powerfully, had more to describe than
any of them. And yet it may be said he never describes characters at
all, with the very slight exceptions of Nestor, in a few words, and
Thersites with somewhat more detail: the latter, it is evident, because
he wanted to concentrate contempt and disgust upon his qualities, for
exhibiting which in action he could not afford to such a wretch any
extended space: the former, perhaps because he has thought it better
for effect to abstain from marking him through the poem by distinctive
epithets, and could produce a certain roundness of figure, highly
suitable to the personage, in this way with more convenience. But, in
general, Homer’s characters are described by their actions only, with
the aid of choice and characteristic epithets, and here and there of
some small but pointed allusion, not from themselves nor from the Poet,
but in the speeches of others. Thus he grapples with the full scale of
the demands of the dramatic art. Others could not follow him. We must
not blame Tasso for a proceeding quite necessary by way of clue to his
poem; rather, indeed, we should praise the ingenious manner in which he
has effected his purpose, by a survey which the Almighty takes of the
Christian camp; a proceeding alike conducive to the religious character
of his poem, not always so well cared for, and to the supply of the
first necessities of his readers.
In the details of his battles, Tasso is a great and skilful describer.
Perhaps in this point alone, out of so many, he may be termed superior
to Homer. At least we may be disposed to think he has nothing so
unsatisfactory under this head as the death of Patroclus. It may
be another question how far he is indebted for instruction in this
department to his great countrymen, especially Ariosto, and also
whether he has anywhere equalled the magnificent account of that
terrible contest with Rodomonte, which, in the Furioso, sums up
Ruggiero’s triumphs.
As nearly all the greater situations and combinations of the
Gerusalemme, and its general framework, have been suggested by the
ancients, so the minor imitations are too numerous for notice. Many
of Tasso’s similes are extremely beautiful and finished; and he has
followed Homer in employing them to relieve the narrative of battle;
but he has not observed the same judicious parsimony in other parts of
his poem; he has apparently not perceived, certainly not followed, the
general rules of Homer in the distribution of this ornament, and the
result has been that they produce a somewhat cloying effect.
Like Virgil, he has been betrayed into imitating Homer in certain
cases, where the whole reason of the case was changed: as, for
instance, in the Invocation before the Catalogue, and in the wish
expressed for multiplied organs of speech. To Homer, a reciting poet,
the Catalogue was a great effort of memory, and it therefore justified
the special application to the Muse: to Tasso it must have been one of
the easier parts of his performance. As respects the second point, what
can be more reasonable in the case of an unwritten composition? what
less so, when the poet works with pen and ink? Nor is the case much
mended by supposing that Tasso had in mind his recitations, unless the
recitation had been, not the accident, but the rule, so that the poem
would itself, in the ordinary course of thought, be conceived of as
associated with the act of reciting.
Tasso seems, however, to have fallen into a more serious error in
introducing a Second Catalogue into his poem. The first may be defended
by the same reasoning, which so amply warrants that of Homer. But what
interest could Christendom or Italy feel in the detailed muster-roll of
the Egyptian army?
~_The Return of Rinaldo._~
If in the Jerusalem the Wrath is beneath the standard of the Iliad,
so is the Return. On the side of Rinaldo, indeed, it is most just and
right, that he should be extricated from the entanglements of the
seductive Armida: but, on the side of Godfrey, there is the same sorry
management of all the moral elements of the case. In Homer, Achilles
was justly and most deeply offended: on every principle known to the
creed of Paganism, or to Greek life and experience, he justly resented
the offence: the utmost that can be imputed to him is a decided excess
in the indulgence of a thoroughly righteous feeling: and this was
terribly expiated by the bloody death of that friend, who was to him
as a second self. But the gross offence of Agamemnon is dealt with
according to the most righteous rules; and he is compelled by word
and gift to appease the man whom he had robbed, insulted, and striven
to degrade. While he is brought both to restitution and to apology,
how different is the arrangement of Tasso’s poem! Rinaldo was wronged
by Gernando: but Godfrey had done no more than his duty: he was the
minister of public justice, of lawful authority, and of military
discipline: in respect to him, and likewise in respect to the army,
Rinaldo was the offender, Godfrey and public right were only the
sufferers; yet Godfrey and public right give way under the pressure of
adversity, and the offender comes back in a kind of triumph.
If it has been found possible in the case of Virgil to institute a more
minute comparison with Homer, this cannot be attempted in the case
of Tasso, for his work hardly admits of juxta-positions in detail.
We have already noticed the abundant stock of real analogies between
the subject of the Trojan expedition, and that of the Crusades.
Tasso himself, in his anxiety to follow Homer, even added to them, by
feigning a centralization of the Christian enterprise, which I fear did
not really exist. But to imitate is one thing, to be like is another;
and it still remains hard really to compare the poems, far harder the
poets. In order to see this clearly, let us ascend a height, and view
the scene which lies before us. How vast a deluge of time and of events
has swept away the very world in which Homer lived, and the worlds that
succeeded his: the place of nativity is changed, the great gulf of time
is stretched between, the language is another, the religion new, all
the chains of association have been taken to pieces and re-forged, all
the old chords of feeling are now mute, and others that give forth a
different music are strung in their stead. And there is also, it must
be confessed, a great and sharp descent from the stature of Homer, as a
creative poet, to that of Tasso. Yet he too is a classic of Italy, and
a classic of the world; and if for a moment we feel it a disparagement
to his country that she suffers in this one comparison, let her soothe
her ruffled recollection by the consciousness, that though Tasso has
not become a rival to Homer, yet he shares this failure with every epic
writer of every land. On the other hand, no modern poet, dealing with
similar subject-matter, has been equal to Tasso. None has erected,
upon similar foundations to his, a fabric so lofty and so durable, so
rich in beauty and in grace: so well entitled, if not to vie with the
very greatest achievement of the ages that went before him, at least
to challenge or to win the admiration of those generations that have
succeeded. But his defeat is, after all, his greatest victory. To lose
the match against Homer is a higher prize than to win it from his other
competitors. Few indeed are the sons of genius, and elect among the
elect, who can be brought into comparison with that sire and king of
verse; and Tasso, we are persuaded, would bear against none a grudge
for thus far, in his own words, limiting his honours:
e ciò fia sommo onore;
Questi già con Gernando in gara venne[973].
[973] Ger. v. 20.