Its bearing as to poetic effect.We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or less of descent from the usual grandeur of Homer, when we find his deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial dignity and presumed power. Nor is the Theomachy proper, in the Twenty-first book of the Iliad, among the most successful parts of the poem. But the principal portion of their agency takes effect upon the elements or other material objects, or upon animals, or upon the human mind by way of influence and suggestion: and its tendency is in general to impart interest and variety, as well as poetic elevation, to the scenery and narrative. The plot of each epic is worked out simultaneously in two different forms upon two different arenas: in Olympus by divine counsel, and on earth by human effort and execution. Yet no confusion results from the double action, while the play and counterplay of the divine and human elements communicate a remarkable elasticity to the movement of the poems. Their value is particularly felt in the Iliad, which, from its limited scene and subject, lies in danger of the sameness which, by this means among others, it on the whole escapes. In particular, the relation between the assisting or patron deities, and the hero or protagonist of each poem, is conducted with great consistency and effect: but the most sublime uses of supernatural machinery to be found throughout the poems are those in which the traces of it are the most shadowy and faintly drawn. Take for example the manner in which Achilles is sent out unarmed to the field, and again, to the manner of his arming, in the Iliad: in the Odyssey, the wonderful picture of divine displeasure and incumbent malediction seeming to gather around and hem in the Suitors of Penelope, concurrently with the preparations for human vengeance: as if the scenewere too dark for eyes like theirs to catch the true meaning of these lowering signals, which give a gloomy but majestic sanction to the terrible swoop of retributive justice alighting upon crime.Its earliest and latest forms.It would be most interesting to pursue the comparison between the believing or credulous infancy of Paganism as we see it in Homer, and its cold and jealous decrepitude as we find it in the writers of its latest period, when the light of the lamp was fading before the already risen Sun.In Homer we find the gods offering in their conduct every sort of example of weakness, passion, and fraud. But they take an active share in the government of the world, and men look up to them, collectively or individually, with more or less of confusion indeed, both intellectual and moral, but still truly and actually as exercising some sort of providential government over the world. The mythology of the time of Homer is a weak, faulty, and corrupt religion, I admit, but still it is a religion, a bond which associates man with the unseen world, and brings some, at least, of its influences to bear upon his conduct and character. And if the Greeks of Homer were not shocked by those immoralities of the Immortals which afterwards came to be thought intolerable, it was not because they were more impure than their posterity, for they were far purer: but the principle of belief in the invisible was in them alike lively and inconsequent; and it was not yet even conscious of a load which, in later times, with enfeebled force, and an augmented critical activity, it could not carry.In the time of Plutarch, about one hundred years after our Lord’s nativity, we find the change complete. There was now no principle of belief in men’s minds which could endure either the good or the evil of the ancientsystem: and a quickened intelligence, as well as the streaming in of rays from Revelation, had made the human intellect more painfully alive to its moral solecisms, without rendering it able to suggest a remedy. Accordingly, Plutarch relieves the Homeric deities from the faults imputed to them by saying, that the Poet has made use of these fictions to excite the fancy[761]:ἐκεῖνα πέπλασται πρὸς ἐκπλῆξιν ἀνθρώπων. Or, again, it was, he says[762], because the name ofΤύχη, Fortune or Chance, was not yet in use, that men referred to the gods what they did not know how to account for in any other manner. Alas for mankind! sad is the state of those, who must reckon the invention of that name among their blessings. In the fact, however, that Homer and his age knew nothing of the word or the idea, he discloses to us one of the many points in which infancy is practically wiser than old age. Let us, Plutarch goes on to say, cure these errors by other passages of the Poet in which he gives us the truth, theὑγιαίνουσαι περὶ θεῶν δόξαι καὶ ἀληθεῖς: but the passages, which he cites with this view, are not passages where the deities are represented as in any active relations of good towards the world: they are simply those which exhibit them as living in a repose undisturbed by care, while they leave for us a destiny of trouble: they are those which relate to theθεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, theαὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν. Stripped of active vice, but yet not adorned with virtue, they become merely cold and selfish, hopeless and inaccessible abstractions.There is in all this a certain logical sequence. The starting point is that of belief in a moral Governor of the universe, good himself, and enjoining goodness upon others. But his own goodness fails, and hisagency among men for the original purpose becomes more and more feeble and equivocal, while the human intellect, sharpened by discussion, and puffed up with knowledge, or with the supposition and phantasm of it, becomes more and more exacting: so that the abstract gods in Cicero are (without doubt) far more elevated than the personal gods of Homer. But they are mere works of art: and, after all, the personal gods of Homer were the only ones that had been really worshipped by men: and when their case becomes so bad that they can no longer be exhibited to the people as rulers of the world, a refuge is found in the Epicurean theory, which relegates them to a heaven of enjoyment and abundance, and on pretence of mental ease denies them any prerogative of intervention in human affairs[763]. The gain of more careful and comprehensive theory is much more than counterbalanced by the practical loss of the personal element, and therefore of the belief in a real Providence, overseeing the affairs of men. So the next onward step is to the doctrine of the Academicians. In theDe Naturâ Deorum, where that sect is represented by Cotta in the discussion with the champions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Cicero himself, and the ruling tendency, if not opinion, of his day, are evidently exhibited to us under Cotta’s name. The transition now made is from gods with a sinecure to no gods at all: and Paganism ends in nullity, just as a moving mass finds its final equilibrium in repose.Its gloomy view of human destiny.Even while heroic Greece and its great Poet existed, the deepest problems of our being were far too dark for man to penetrate. The picture which I have rudelydrawn, and which is not wholly a joyless picture, was liable to be blackened, even for this world, by many a storm of crime and of calamity; at the very best it was a picture for this world only, for the mortality and not the immortality of man. But that scene has its close: and most touching it is to see that, with all his creative power, with all his imaginative brightness, with all the advantage he derived from living in the youth of the world, before mankind had fully sounded the depth of their own fall, or had begun to accumulate the sad records of their miseries and crimes; even Homer could not solve the enigma of our condition, or disperse the clouds that gathered round our destiny. There are two profoundly memorable passages in the poems, which have set their double seal on this truth. One of them is in the Odyssey: it is a confession from the mouth of that Achilles, in whose mind and person, as they are delineated by Homer, our humanity has been carried perhaps to a higher point of grandeur, than it has ever since attained. ‘Do not, illustrious Ulysses, do not palter with me about death,’ says the mournful shade. ‘Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye and a needy master, upon the face of earth, than be lord of the whole world of the departed[764]:’μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.A trail of heavenly light indeed so far played upon the heroic world, that we hear of those few who had already been translated to the skies; and of two more, one a son of Jupiter, already in the peaceful Elysian plains,and the other Menelaus, who, as his daughter’s husband, was likewise to be carried thither on his decease. But it is the mouth of Achilles, the illustrious, the godlike Achilles, which here utters, in tones so deeply mournful, the common voice of the children of Adam.It was the very same conclusion which, as we find in another place[765], this favoured mortal had formed on earth.The second passage is one spoken by Jupiter himself. As the commonest epithets used by Homer forβροτοὶ, mortals, areδειλοὶandοἰζυροὶ, so the highest god lays down the law of their condition, describing it as that than which there is nothing more wretched among all that live and move upon the earth[766]:οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸςπάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.Such as we have seen, and so glorious, was the wisdom, and the valour, and the beauty, and the power, that dwelt in man; but only that through life he might, upon the whole, be paramount in woe above all meaner creatures, and then that he might die in a gloom unrelieved by hope. None have illustrated this piercing truth by contrasts so sharp as Homer, between the chill and dismal tone of the general destiny of man on the one hand, and on the other, the joy and cheerfulness which the effort of an elastic spirit can for a time create. But the woe which he could only exhibit, it was reserved for One greater than he, yet only by sorrow and suffering, to remove.The personal belief of Homer.I have forborne in this Essay from entering at large into the often agitated question, whether Homer believed in the deities of whom he speaks so largely.He may express his own childlike creed; and such a creed by no means requires for its support in the individual mind, that it should have been visibly represented by facts within its own experience. Or he may use as the material of poetry that which, without approving itself to his own heart, was, nevertheless, to his hearers in general, a real and substantial system of religion. Nay, he might even be dealing with what had ceased to be believed in his day, but had still a retrospective life, because it had been the hearty, and was still the conventional, worship of the people. The truth may lie in, or it may lie between, any of these suppositions. The one thing of which I feel most assured is, that he was not, as to his religion, a mere allegorist when speaking of his Jupiter and Minerva, any more than he was a mere hypocrite, when he ascribed occurrences in human life to Providence under the name of ‘the deity,’ or ‘the deities.’ He represents what either was or had been, for his people, a belief in the unseen under particular forms, and what still in some way represented a reality for them and for himself. It is this belief of which I have spoken throughout, and which, under any of the suppositions I have made, seems to me to warrant all the stress I have laid upon it.To attempt a formal solution of the question, whether he believed or not in the dress of his religion, as well as in the religion itself, would, I fear, be frivolous. It is a case in some degree parallel to the disputes whether Shakspeare adhered, in the controversies of the sixteenth century, to the side of the Romish or the Reformed. Neither Shakspeare nor Homer ought to be judged as if they had been theologiansex professo. Both followed the law of their sublime art,and represented in forms of beauty and delight, or of majesty and gloom, as the case required, such materials as they found ready to hand. Critical analysis, nice equipoises, strict definitions, were for neither the one nor the other. But in the works of neither do the cold tones of scepticism find an echo: and probably the mental frame of both with reference to the substance of their religion may have been not very different from that of the poor, the maidens, and the children of their day.
Its bearing as to poetic effect.
We may, however, justly distinguish between the influence of mythology on the morality of the Poems, and its operation with regard to poetic effect. In this view the consequences of its introduction, though mixed, are upon the whole highly favourable. There is indeed more or less of descent from the usual grandeur of Homer, when we find his deities mingling in actual conflict: because they never sustain in the field of battle a part at all corresponding to their celestial dignity and presumed power. Nor is the Theomachy proper, in the Twenty-first book of the Iliad, among the most successful parts of the poem. But the principal portion of their agency takes effect upon the elements or other material objects, or upon animals, or upon the human mind by way of influence and suggestion: and its tendency is in general to impart interest and variety, as well as poetic elevation, to the scenery and narrative. The plot of each epic is worked out simultaneously in two different forms upon two different arenas: in Olympus by divine counsel, and on earth by human effort and execution. Yet no confusion results from the double action, while the play and counterplay of the divine and human elements communicate a remarkable elasticity to the movement of the poems. Their value is particularly felt in the Iliad, which, from its limited scene and subject, lies in danger of the sameness which, by this means among others, it on the whole escapes. In particular, the relation between the assisting or patron deities, and the hero or protagonist of each poem, is conducted with great consistency and effect: but the most sublime uses of supernatural machinery to be found throughout the poems are those in which the traces of it are the most shadowy and faintly drawn. Take for example the manner in which Achilles is sent out unarmed to the field, and again, to the manner of his arming, in the Iliad: in the Odyssey, the wonderful picture of divine displeasure and incumbent malediction seeming to gather around and hem in the Suitors of Penelope, concurrently with the preparations for human vengeance: as if the scenewere too dark for eyes like theirs to catch the true meaning of these lowering signals, which give a gloomy but majestic sanction to the terrible swoop of retributive justice alighting upon crime.
Its earliest and latest forms.
It would be most interesting to pursue the comparison between the believing or credulous infancy of Paganism as we see it in Homer, and its cold and jealous decrepitude as we find it in the writers of its latest period, when the light of the lamp was fading before the already risen Sun.
In Homer we find the gods offering in their conduct every sort of example of weakness, passion, and fraud. But they take an active share in the government of the world, and men look up to them, collectively or individually, with more or less of confusion indeed, both intellectual and moral, but still truly and actually as exercising some sort of providential government over the world. The mythology of the time of Homer is a weak, faulty, and corrupt religion, I admit, but still it is a religion, a bond which associates man with the unseen world, and brings some, at least, of its influences to bear upon his conduct and character. And if the Greeks of Homer were not shocked by those immoralities of the Immortals which afterwards came to be thought intolerable, it was not because they were more impure than their posterity, for they were far purer: but the principle of belief in the invisible was in them alike lively and inconsequent; and it was not yet even conscious of a load which, in later times, with enfeebled force, and an augmented critical activity, it could not carry.
In the time of Plutarch, about one hundred years after our Lord’s nativity, we find the change complete. There was now no principle of belief in men’s minds which could endure either the good or the evil of the ancientsystem: and a quickened intelligence, as well as the streaming in of rays from Revelation, had made the human intellect more painfully alive to its moral solecisms, without rendering it able to suggest a remedy. Accordingly, Plutarch relieves the Homeric deities from the faults imputed to them by saying, that the Poet has made use of these fictions to excite the fancy[761]:ἐκεῖνα πέπλασται πρὸς ἐκπλῆξιν ἀνθρώπων. Or, again, it was, he says[762], because the name ofΤύχη, Fortune or Chance, was not yet in use, that men referred to the gods what they did not know how to account for in any other manner. Alas for mankind! sad is the state of those, who must reckon the invention of that name among their blessings. In the fact, however, that Homer and his age knew nothing of the word or the idea, he discloses to us one of the many points in which infancy is practically wiser than old age. Let us, Plutarch goes on to say, cure these errors by other passages of the Poet in which he gives us the truth, theὑγιαίνουσαι περὶ θεῶν δόξαι καὶ ἀληθεῖς: but the passages, which he cites with this view, are not passages where the deities are represented as in any active relations of good towards the world: they are simply those which exhibit them as living in a repose undisturbed by care, while they leave for us a destiny of trouble: they are those which relate to theθεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες, theαὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσίν. Stripped of active vice, but yet not adorned with virtue, they become merely cold and selfish, hopeless and inaccessible abstractions.
There is in all this a certain logical sequence. The starting point is that of belief in a moral Governor of the universe, good himself, and enjoining goodness upon others. But his own goodness fails, and hisagency among men for the original purpose becomes more and more feeble and equivocal, while the human intellect, sharpened by discussion, and puffed up with knowledge, or with the supposition and phantasm of it, becomes more and more exacting: so that the abstract gods in Cicero are (without doubt) far more elevated than the personal gods of Homer. But they are mere works of art: and, after all, the personal gods of Homer were the only ones that had been really worshipped by men: and when their case becomes so bad that they can no longer be exhibited to the people as rulers of the world, a refuge is found in the Epicurean theory, which relegates them to a heaven of enjoyment and abundance, and on pretence of mental ease denies them any prerogative of intervention in human affairs[763]. The gain of more careful and comprehensive theory is much more than counterbalanced by the practical loss of the personal element, and therefore of the belief in a real Providence, overseeing the affairs of men. So the next onward step is to the doctrine of the Academicians. In theDe Naturâ Deorum, where that sect is represented by Cotta in the discussion with the champions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Cicero himself, and the ruling tendency, if not opinion, of his day, are evidently exhibited to us under Cotta’s name. The transition now made is from gods with a sinecure to no gods at all: and Paganism ends in nullity, just as a moving mass finds its final equilibrium in repose.
Its gloomy view of human destiny.
Even while heroic Greece and its great Poet existed, the deepest problems of our being were far too dark for man to penetrate. The picture which I have rudelydrawn, and which is not wholly a joyless picture, was liable to be blackened, even for this world, by many a storm of crime and of calamity; at the very best it was a picture for this world only, for the mortality and not the immortality of man. But that scene has its close: and most touching it is to see that, with all his creative power, with all his imaginative brightness, with all the advantage he derived from living in the youth of the world, before mankind had fully sounded the depth of their own fall, or had begun to accumulate the sad records of their miseries and crimes; even Homer could not solve the enigma of our condition, or disperse the clouds that gathered round our destiny. There are two profoundly memorable passages in the poems, which have set their double seal on this truth. One of them is in the Odyssey: it is a confession from the mouth of that Achilles, in whose mind and person, as they are delineated by Homer, our humanity has been carried perhaps to a higher point of grandeur, than it has ever since attained. ‘Do not, illustrious Ulysses, do not palter with me about death,’ says the mournful shade. ‘Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye and a needy master, upon the face of earth, than be lord of the whole world of the departed[764]:’
μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.
μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.
μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.
μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ·
βουλοίμην κ’ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ
ἀνδρὶ παρ’ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,
ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν.
A trail of heavenly light indeed so far played upon the heroic world, that we hear of those few who had already been translated to the skies; and of two more, one a son of Jupiter, already in the peaceful Elysian plains,and the other Menelaus, who, as his daughter’s husband, was likewise to be carried thither on his decease. But it is the mouth of Achilles, the illustrious, the godlike Achilles, which here utters, in tones so deeply mournful, the common voice of the children of Adam.
It was the very same conclusion which, as we find in another place[765], this favoured mortal had formed on earth.
The second passage is one spoken by Jupiter himself. As the commonest epithets used by Homer forβροτοὶ, mortals, areδειλοὶandοἰζυροὶ, so the highest god lays down the law of their condition, describing it as that than which there is nothing more wretched among all that live and move upon the earth[766]:
οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸςπάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.
οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸςπάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.
οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸςπάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.
οὐ μὲν γάρ τί πού ἐστιν ὀϊζυρώτερον ἀνδρὸς
πάντων, ὅσσα τε γαῖαν ἔπι πνείει τε καὶ ἕρπει.
Such as we have seen, and so glorious, was the wisdom, and the valour, and the beauty, and the power, that dwelt in man; but only that through life he might, upon the whole, be paramount in woe above all meaner creatures, and then that he might die in a gloom unrelieved by hope. None have illustrated this piercing truth by contrasts so sharp as Homer, between the chill and dismal tone of the general destiny of man on the one hand, and on the other, the joy and cheerfulness which the effort of an elastic spirit can for a time create. But the woe which he could only exhibit, it was reserved for One greater than he, yet only by sorrow and suffering, to remove.
The personal belief of Homer.
I have forborne in this Essay from entering at large into the often agitated question, whether Homer believed in the deities of whom he speaks so largely.He may express his own childlike creed; and such a creed by no means requires for its support in the individual mind, that it should have been visibly represented by facts within its own experience. Or he may use as the material of poetry that which, without approving itself to his own heart, was, nevertheless, to his hearers in general, a real and substantial system of religion. Nay, he might even be dealing with what had ceased to be believed in his day, but had still a retrospective life, because it had been the hearty, and was still the conventional, worship of the people. The truth may lie in, or it may lie between, any of these suppositions. The one thing of which I feel most assured is, that he was not, as to his religion, a mere allegorist when speaking of his Jupiter and Minerva, any more than he was a mere hypocrite, when he ascribed occurrences in human life to Providence under the name of ‘the deity,’ or ‘the deities.’ He represents what either was or had been, for his people, a belief in the unseen under particular forms, and what still in some way represented a reality for them and for himself. It is this belief of which I have spoken throughout, and which, under any of the suppositions I have made, seems to me to warrant all the stress I have laid upon it.
To attempt a formal solution of the question, whether he believed or not in the dress of his religion, as well as in the religion itself, would, I fear, be frivolous. It is a case in some degree parallel to the disputes whether Shakspeare adhered, in the controversies of the sixteenth century, to the side of the Romish or the Reformed. Neither Shakspeare nor Homer ought to be judged as if they had been theologiansex professo. Both followed the law of their sublime art,and represented in forms of beauty and delight, or of majesty and gloom, as the case required, such materials as they found ready to hand. Critical analysis, nice equipoises, strict definitions, were for neither the one nor the other. But in the works of neither do the cold tones of scepticism find an echo: and probably the mental frame of both with reference to the substance of their religion may have been not very different from that of the poor, the maidens, and the children of their day.