CHAPTER XIII.
MR. GLADSTONE’S PUBLICATIONS.
When George III. was King, two of his servants, as retired Ministers, met one another at Bath. Said one of them, Lord Mendip, to the other, Lord Camden, ‘I hope you are well and in the enjoyment of a happy old age.’ Lord Camden replied in a querulous tone: ‘Happy! How can a man be happy who has survived all his passions and enjoyments?’ ‘Oh, my dear lord,’ was the reply of his old antagonist, ‘do not talk so; while God is pleased to enable me to read my Homer and my Bible, I cannot but be thankful and happy.’ It is easy to imagine Mr. Gladstone making a similar reply. His love of Homer is only equalled by his love of the Bible. Porson used to say of Bishop Pearson that, if he had not muddled his head with theology, he would have been a first-class critic in Greek. Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, has had a good deal to do with theology, but that he has not muddled his brains with it is clear, not merely from his active life as a statesman, but from the perusal of the many valuable works he has written on Homer, and his life and time and work. The subject seems to have endless attractions for him. Charles James Fox used to read Homer through every year. Mr. Gladstone displays a still greater enthusiasm. In this department of human inquiry he has been emphatically distinguished, and his works on Homer, to do them adequate justice, would require a volume by no means small to themselves. In 1838 his first great work on the subject appeared. It was entitled ‘Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age,’ and consisted of three large volumes. In 1869 he republished and rewrote a great part of the previous volumes in his ‘Juventus Mundi: the Gods and Men of the Heroic Age.’ ‘I am anxious,’ he writes, ‘to commend to inquirers and readers generally conclusions from the Homeric poems which appear to me to be of great interest with reference to the general history of human culture, and in connection therewith with the Providential government of the world. But I am much more anxious to encourage and facilitate the access of educated persons to the actual contents of the text. The amount and variety of these contents have not been fully apparent. The delight received from the poems has possibly had some influence in disposing the generality of readers to rest satisfied with their enjoyment. The doubts cast upon their origin must have assisted in producing and fostering a vague instinctive indisposition to further laborious examination. The very splendour of the poems dazzles the eyes with whole sheets of lightning, and may almost give to analysis the character of vulgarity or impertinence.’ In his preface Mr. Gladstone tells us that his ideas have been considerably modified in the ethnological and mythological portions of his inquiry. The chief source of modification in the former has been that a further prosecution of the subject with respect to the Phœnicians has brought out more clearly and fully what he had only ventured to suspect—a highly influential function in forming the Greek element. A fuller view of this element in its composition naturally aids in an important manner upon any estimate of Pelasgians and Hellenes respectively. This Phœnician influence reaches far into the sphere of mythology, and tends, as he thinks, greatly to clear the views we may reasonably take of that curious and interesting subject. The aim of this revised edition of his Homeric studies was to assist Homeric studies in our schools and Universities, and to convey a practical knowledge of the subject to persons who are not habitual students.
Few men have found time to appear in print so frequently as Mr. Gladstone. His latest publication bears the date of 1898; his earliest appeared in 1837. One of his great topics has been Homer. The old Greek poet ought to be, according to Mr. Gladstone, in everyone’s hands. His latest work on the subject was the ‘Landmarks of Homeric Study, together with an Essay on the Points of Contact between the Assyrian Tablets and the Homeric Text,’ which appeared in 1890. Among the numberless solutions of the Homeric question since the days of Wolff, he still maintains the traditional view that there was but one Homer, that he wrote both poems, and that the poems themselves should be regarded as a historic whole. In Mr. Gladstone’s view one of Homer’s chief functions was to weld the diverse elements of the Hellenic nation into one. National unity necessarily involved religious unity, and so Mr. Gladstone goes on to propound the theory that Homer endeavoured to find a place in his heaven for all the gods that had been worshipped by the different races he was welding together, and that with this view he created a composite system of religion. It affords us matter for wonder, he says, as well as admiration, how Homer excluded from this new composite system the most degrading ingredients in which the religions around him abounded. Though forced to admit Aphrodite, he only admitted her to a lower place, and presented her in an unfavourable light. She is, in fact, only the Assyrian Ishtar, the Ashtoreth of the Hebrews and Phœnicians. He also elaborately contends that there was a good deal of morality among Homer’s Greeks, far more than is generally supposed. The Politics of Homer form another chapter, and he finds high praise for the value the poet attached to personal freedom, and in the extraordinary power for those times he attached to the spoken word. Except in the concluding chapter on Assyrian Tablets and the Homeric Texts, Mr. Gladstone added little to what is to be found in one or other of his previous books.
In 1896 appeared ‘The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture,’ revised and enlarged from Good Words. The argument appears to be that in the science and history of the Holy Bible there may be detected a degree of accuracy plainly supernatural and miraculous. With great warmth he owns his desire to prevent his countrymen from relaxing their hold on the Bible, which Christendom regards as ‘an inestimable treasure,’ and thus bringing on themselves ‘inexpressible calamity.’ He adopts towards Hebrew specialists an attitude neither defiant nor abjectly submissive. The meaning of Hebrew words must, of course, be determined by Hebrew scholars; but he argues that we must not forget the risks to which specialists themselves are exposed. ‘Among them,’ he writes, ‘as with other men, there may be fashions of the time and school, which Lord Bacon called idols of the market-place, and currents of prejudice below the surface, such as to detract somewhat from the authority which each inquirer may justly claim in his own field, and from their title to impose these conclusions upon mankind.’ And so often has it already happened that the Bible was supposed to be submerged by some wave of opinion, which proved, after all, to be passing and ephemeral, that we may have confidence in its power of weathering storms. He holds that if, even for argument’s sake, one concession were to be made to specialists of all they can be entitled to ask respecting the age, the authorship, the text of the books, he may still invite his readers to stand with him on the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture. Apart from all that science or criticism may say, he can still challenge men to accept the Scriptures on the moral and spiritual and historical ground of their character in themselves. In the course of his work he treats successively of the creation story as told in the first chapter of Genesis, of the Psalms, of the Mosaic legislation, of the Deluge, and of recent corroborations of Scripture from history and natural science.
In 1848 Mr. Gladstone wrote a Latin version of Toplady’s hymn, ‘Rock of Ages,’ though it did not appear till 1861, when it was published in a volume of translations by himself and Lord Lyttelton, issued by them in memory of their marriage to two sisters. The following is the translation:
‘Jesu, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus.
Tu per lympham profluentem,
Tu per sanguinem tepentem,
In peccata mi redunda,
Tolle culpam, sordes munda.‘Coram Te, nec justus forem,
Quamvis totâ vi laborem,
Nec si fide nunquam cesso,
Fletu stillans indefesso,
Tibi soli tantum munus;
Salva me, Salvator unus!‘Nil in manu mecum fero,
Sed me versus crucem gero;
Vestimenta nudus oro,
Opem debilis imploro;
Fontem Christi quæro immundus
Nisi laves, moribundus.‘Dum hos artus vita regit;
Quando nox sepulchro tegit;
Mortuos cum stare jubes,
Sedens Judex inter nubes;
Jesu, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus.’
In 1863 Mr. Gladstone printed his translation of the first book of the ‘Iliad.’ He sent a copy to Lord Lyndhurst, then in his ninety-first year. The aged critic replied in the following letter. The accident to which it alludes was one which had happened some days before to Mr. Gladstone when riding in the Park:
‘My dear Gladstone,
‘We are very sorry for your accident, but rejoice that the consequence is not likely to be serious. What should we do with the surplus without you? I return with thanks the translation. It is a remarkable effort of ingenuity, literal almost to a fault, and in a poetical form. But is the trochee suited to our heroic verse? Its real character is in some degree disguised by your mode of printing the lines. If the usual mode were adopted, the defect would at once appear:
‘“Of Achilles, son of Peleus,
How the deadly wrath arose!
How the hosts of the Achaians
Rued it with ten thousand woes!”Written and read in this way, it has a sort of ballad air. If I am wrong, correct me. Perhaps I have been too long accustomed to the iambic measure with variations, as best suited to English heroic poetry, to be able to form a correct opinion. As an example of trochaic lines, there are several in Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”:
‘“Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drunken joys did first ordain,” etc.’
Mr. Gladstone thought so highly of this criticism that he wrote back asking permission to print it in a contemplated preface to his translation. ‘It is not,’ he said, ‘from a mere wish to parade you as my correspondent, though this wish may have its share. Your observation on my metre, which has great force, cuts, I think, deep into the matter—into the principles of Homeric translation. So pray let me have your permission.’
As an illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s skill as a translator, let me add some verses from his version of the ‘Hecuba’ of Euripides, seven pages of which appeared in the Contemporary Review a few years since, though the translation was made in his Eton days: