W. E. Gladstone

“ Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features. She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy, willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. ”

“ The sustained stateliness of diction, metre, and rhythm in the Æneid is a feat, and an astounding feat; but it is more like the performance of a trained athlete, between trick and strength, than the grandeur of free and simple Nature, such as it is seen in the ancient warrior, in Diomed or Achilles; or in Homer, the ancient warrior’s only bard. Different persons will, according to their temperaments, be apt to treat this augustness of diction as a merit or a fault: all, however, must acknowledge it to be a wonder. ”

“ In him alone has Homer presented to us that most commanding and most moving combination, of a woman’s gentleness and deep affection with warlike and heroic strength. If the hand of Hector was far weaker than that of the son of Peleus, the tempestuous griefs of Achilles do not open to us a character nearly so attractive as the depth of the gentle affections of Hector, and the mildness warmed into such brilliancy by his martial fame. ”

“ Take, then, the personifications of all the forms of Terror in the train of Mars: the transport, by Sleep and Death, of the body of Sarpedon to his home; the tears of blood wept by Jupiter; the agitation of the sea in sympathy with Neptune’s warlike parade; the dread of Aidoneus lest the crust of earth should give way under the tramp of the gods in battle; the mourning garb of Thetis for the friend of her son’s youth; the long train of Nymphs, rising from the depths of the sea to accompany her, when she mounts to visit the sorrowing Achilles ”

“ It takes time to sound the depths of Homer. Possibly, or even probably, many may share the idea that what Achilles resents is the mere loss of a captive woman, and that restitution would at once undo the wrong. But they misconceive the act, and the man also, to whom the wrong was done. The soul of Achilles is stirred from its depths by an outrage, which seems to him to comprehend all vices within itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if he had simply done this, if he had cut off the interest and sympathies of his readers from the Trojans by general disparagement, he would have deprived Greek valour of its choicest crown. It is a noble necessity of war that, even in the interest of countrymen, we cannot do injustice to adversaries, without feeling the offence recoil on our own heads.
Thus it was impossible for Homer to make his Trojan hero at once great and consistent; and if he has made Hector unequal, it was to avoid making him mean. ”

“ Do the laws of poetical verisimilitude and beauty, as they were understood by Homer, allow us to suppose that he intended to represent his countrymen, of whom he has presented to us so lofty a conception, as agitating the world, forsaking home, pouring forth their blood, and throwing their country into certain confusion, for the sake of a vile and worthless character? Certainly there were periods, when in the Greek mind the worship of beauty was so thoroughly dissociated from all which beauty ought to typify, that an Iliad so constructed might have been approved. ”

“ For two thousand years, however, perhaps for more, the Geography of the Odyssey has been a subject of interest and of controversy. In entering upon that field I ask myself, why the case of Homer is in this respect so different from that of the great Italian romancers? It is not only that, great as they were, we are dealing with one before whom their greatness dwindles into comparative littleness. Nor is it only, though it seems to be in part, because the adventures of Ulysses are, or appear to be, much more strictly bound up with place, than those of Orlando, Rinaldo, or Ruggiero. ”

“ They delight in sound, in multitude, above all in motion. The automatic chairs of Vulcan, the living theatre of the Shield of Achilles, that oldest mirror of our world, the bounding armour of the same hero, what are all these but the proofs of that redundant energy of life, whose first resistless impulse it was to carry the vital fire of Prometheus into every object that it encountered, and which, not yet having felt the palsying touch of exhaustion, lay under no necessity of curative provisions for repose? ”

“ III. The character of Paris is as worthy, as any other in the poems, of the powerful hand and just judgment of Homer. It is neither on the one hand slightly, nor on the other too elaborately, drawn; the touches are just such and so many, as his poetic purpose seemed on the one hand to demand, and on the other to admit. Paris is not indeed the gentleman, but he is the fine gentleman, and the pattern voluptuary, of the heroic ages; and all his successors in these capacities may well be wished joy of their illustrious prototype. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 neither of these involves one particle of courage, or of any other virtue; for the archer of Homer’s time was not like the British bowman, who stood with his comrades in the line, and discharged the function in war which has since fallen to musketry; he was a mere sharpshooter, always having the most deliberate opportunity of aim at the enemy, and always himself out of danger. No archer is ever hit in the Iliad; but Pandarus, so skilled in the bow, is slain, and Paris is disgraced, when they respectively venture to assume the spear. ”

“ The Greeks move in silence and discipline, like the swelling waves when the tempest is just beginning to gather: the Trojans, like innumerable sheep, who stand bleating in the fold while they are being milked [723] . In the Fifth Book, while it is mentioned, as if casually, that Apollo, Mars, and Eris, were stirring and keeping up the Trojans, it is subjoined, without ostensible reference to this intimation, but plainly in artful contrast with it, that the Greeks found sufficient incentives in the exhortations of the two Ajaxes, of Ulysses, and of Diomed [724] . ”

“ The extinction of liberty utterly deprived him of another. Homer saw before him both a religion and a polity young, fresh, and vigorous; for Virgil both were practically dead: and whatever this world has of true greatness is so closely dependent upon them, that it was not his fault if his poem felt and bears cogent witness to the loss. Even the sphere of personal morality was not open to him; for what principle of truth or righteousness could he worthily have glorified, without passing severe condemnation on some capital act of the man, whom it was his chief obligation to exalt? ”

“ We miss entirely that unfathomable power of intellect, of passion, and also of bodily force, all combined in one figure, which carry the Achilles of Homer beyond every other human example in the quality of sheer grandeur, and make it touch the limits of the superhuman. There is nothing said or done by the Achilles of Euripides, nothing reported of him or assigned to him, no impression borne into a reader’s mind concerning him, which would not have been perfectly suitable to other warriors ”

“ He had to construct his epic for a court, and a corrupt court, not for mankind at large; it followed, that he could not take his stand upon those deep and broad foundations in human nature itself, which gave Homer a position of universal command. Hence as a general rule he does not sing from the heart, nor to the heart. His touches of genuine nature are rare. Such of them as occur have been carefully noted and applauded, for he is always studious to set them off by choice and melodious diction. ”

“ He is incessantly conversant with the nature and the life of man; and though for the most part he draws us, as Flaxman has drawn him, in outline only, yet by the strength and depth of his touch he has produced figures, for example, Francesca and Ugolino, that have as largely become the common property of mankind, if not as Achilles and Ulysses, yet as Lear and Hamlet. ”

“ Yet these great chiefs, so strong and brave and wise, so proud and stern, so equipped in arts, manners, and accomplishments, can upon occasion weep like a woman or a child. Ulysses, in the island of Calypso daily pours forth his ‘waterfloods’ as he strains his vision over the sea; and he covers up his head in the halls of Alcinous, while Demodocus is singing, that his tears may flow unobserved. ”

“ Ulysses, after a long course of severe discipline patiently endured, has awarded to him a peaceful old age, and a calm death, in his Ithaca barren but beloved, with his people prospering around him. Achilles, on the other hand, is so loaded with gorgeous gifts that, wonderful as is their harmony in all points but one, that one is the centre. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It can hardly fail to draw remark, that the spirit of Achilles never from the first moment fastens on mere restitution, or on restitution at all, as its object. With his knowledge of his own might, which was enough to prompt him, had he not been restrained from heaven, to assail and slay Agamemnon on the spot, he nevertheless does not so much as entertain the thought of fighting to keep Briseis. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Votes were not polled in the Olympus of Homer; yet a minority of influential gods carry the day in favour of the Greeks against the majority, and against their Head. There surely could not be a grosser error than to deny every power to be a real one, unless we are able both to measure its results in a table of statistics, and to trace at every step, with our weak and partial vision, the precise mode by which it works towards its end. ”