In the far gates of the Lœstrygones, 'where such a narrow rim of night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving home his flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture,' we have, perhaps, some tale of a Phœnician mariner, who had wandered into the North Seas, and seen 'the Norway sun set into sunrise.' But what shall we say to that Syrian isle, 'where disease is not, nor hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?' There is nothing in the Iliad like any of these stories.
Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the poems. Each is so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's own choice of the material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[X] Fraser's Magazine, 1851.
[Y] Mackay's Progress of the Intellect.
THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.
1850.
If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals—as men who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection; the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word. Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say little in this place. The 'Lives' have no form or beauty to give them attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank. And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pass for anything in the estimate—and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.
Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of natural history or of metaphysical speculation, and we do not laugh at them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief. Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew, and they could not grow; they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human institutions as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead when their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism can never more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer attitude towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediæval mythology what it has done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find there also at least as deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a moral element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the saints are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty, they are always good.