Poets,[[971]] it is constantly repeated, commence in every country the mental movement which evolves civilisation out of the chaos of barbarism; but it remains a mystery how and by what they themselves are moved. There may possibly be something more than a figure of speech in the old affirmation that they were inspired of heaven. Their imagination towered to so great a height that it was kindled by the lamps of the firmament, and may be regarded as that fabled Prometheus who applied the flame of science to the human clay. I do not therefore see what objection can be urged against our maintaining the old doctrine that poets partook and partake still, when their minds are pure, of a divine impulse—that to the infant nations of the earth they were teachers commissioned from on high.
The condition of the mind in those early ages when poets were the only oracles, it is difficult for men surfeited with the luxuries of a prolific literature to comprehend. Among the Arabs of the desert we may still perhaps discover something similar. Deprived of books, but enjoying much leisure, they eagerly treasure up in their memories the moral distich, the apologue, the tale which instructs while it delights, and thus mentally furnished with a few weapons they are often wiser in deliberation, more persuasive in discourse, more ready in action than persons of education in civilised countries, whose intellectual armoury is so full that in the moment of danger they know not what weapon to choose. Poets, among such a race and under such circumstances, feel that they have a high mission to fulfil; their endeavours are not by polished rhythmical trifles to amuse a few rich and noble persons, but to clothe in befitting language and marry to immortal verse those great central truths, upon which the whole system of the future world of civilisation must revolve. We find them always curiously adapting their revelations to the times. First, the great fundamental truths of religion, the basis of the social structure, are infused into the public mind. Next the rudiments of politics and legislation, the precepts of agriculture, the leading rules of the useful arts, the observances of civil life, and the first faint whispers of the passions and affections are treasured up in their lays. Then, growing bolder by degrees, they aim at subduing the whole empire of knowledge, and impetuously, with numerous charms and allurements, hurry mankind forward in a sort of orgiastic rapture to the very threshold of philosophy.
Among the earliest names in the literary traditions of Hellas are those of Olen, Pamphos, Musæos and Orpheus,[[972]] who, for their wisdom, are said to be sprung from the gods. They were sacred bards, whose genius obtained for them an ascendency over the minds of their countrymen. Yet all they attempted, perhaps, was to teach the doctrine of prayer, thanksgiving, sacrifice, which, being afterwards misunderstood, caused them to be confounded with those impostors and incantation-mongers, who, in more recent times, granted absolutions and sold indulgences both to individuals and states, with a hardihood worthy of Giovanni di Medici. Musæos, older probably than Orpheus, though sometimes regarded as his disciple, is said by certain traditions to have been a teacher of ethics, who delivered a body of moral precepts in four thousand verses. His country is unknown,—for he is now represented as an Athenian, now as a Thracian,—but his name and the name of Orpheus and Eumolpos are associated with the expiations, orgies, mysteries, celebrated during many ages in honour of Demeter and Dionysos.[[973]] We must rest content, however, with very imperfect notions of what they were, for, in looking back at these great men, whom we behold on the edge of the horizon, enlarged like the sun at its setting by misty exhalations, but by the same means rendered dim and obscure, we can form no just idea of their character.
These, however, and such as these, were the men who fabricated the first link in that chain of thought and beauty, which, stretching over the gulf of time and fastened to the skies, still holds up the nations of the earth from sinking into barbarism. Literature is degraded when contemplated as an art or as an amusement. It is a paradise, into which the best fruits of the soul, when arrived at their greatest maturity and beauty, are transplanted to bloom in immortal freshness and fragrance. It is the garner wherein the seeds of religion, virtue, morals, national greatness and individual happiness are preserved for the use of humanity. It is a gallery, where the likenesses of all the great and noble souls who have shed light and glory on the earth, are treasured up as the heirloom and palladium of the human race. It is impossible, therefore, for any but the most sordid minds to look back towards the venerable fathers of literature without a deep thrill of filial reverence and love, conjoined with the generous impulse and yearning desire to enlarge and add fresh brightness to the halo which encircles their names. They were not, what since too many have been, the instruments and panders to the pleasures of worldlings. Conscious of the holy mission wherewith, according to their creed, the father of gods and men had intrusted them, they stood forward as the apostles of truth, encircled by the majesty which a sense of divine inspiration must impart. They felt a harmony within their souls which, in manifesting itself, sought the aid of harmonious language; and hence the precepts of wisdom, distilling from their lips like honey from the honeycomb, moulded themselves naturally into verse, at whose sound the fountains of the great deep of knowledge were broken up, and the windows of heaven opened, and a deluge of philosophy and science and intellectual delight poured forth upon the amazed world.
In what age or province of Greece arose the first minister of this poetical revelation, it is not now possible to decide. The art of writing, however, which the Egyptian king regarded as the enemy of memory, had not passed the Ægæan. The songs men heard were wafted on the wings of music from tongue to tongue, and, by degrees, the professors of this marvellous art, by which the wisdom and the glory of the past were embalmed in the sweets of verse, embodied themselves into a distinct order called Aoidoi or Singers.[[974]] The life of these men in the remote ages of antiquity is little known to us. Wanderers, however, for the most part they were, in some respects not unlike the Jongleurs and Troubadours of the middle ages, though occupying a higher station and guided by a higher aim. Their first and ostensible object was, doubtless, to delight; but it is of great importance to inspire men with a delight in lofty and ennobling conceptions,—to withdraw them for a moment from pursuits sordid or brutalising or unmanly, to the contemplation of heroic acts,—of honour, of patriotism, of friendship,—of the great and solid advantages accruing from peace and commerce, and the experience of travel and adversity.
What were the rewards they obtained it is easy to conjecture. They consisted, principally, in the rays of joy reflected back upon them by a thousand happy countenances at once. Gain they neither would nor could regard. He who renders multitudes wise and happy must be happy and wise himself; and wisdom scorns to measure its gifts against gold. The truly wise and great man, therefore, if fortune have originally befriended him, will shower his benefactions, as God his rain, liberally and without distinction upon all; and if necessity compel him to receive some return, his moderation will content itself with the least possible amount. Embraced within the circle of refinement which they themselves had created, however, they gradually became secularised, though we must be careful to distinguish them from their successors of a later age. The prodigious admiration which they and their songs excited may be learned from those passages in Homer where Phemios and Demodocos are introduced, and from that animated dialogue of Plato, in which the rhapsodist Ion describes his office and his audience. It has been justly remarked, that if this man, a mere actor, could hurry into whatever channel he pleased the affections of a whole theatre, melt them into tears, fire them with indignation, or clothe their countenances with the smiles of joy, much more would the poets themselves work upon their passions by an art far nearer nature.
Care must, no doubt, be taken not to confound the Rhapsodists with the Aoidoi who preceded them, though it be certain that the manners and condition of the later race may serve to throw considerable light on those of the earlier. Both have recently much occupied the attention of the learned; and Wolff in particular deserves credit for his defence of the Rhapsodists, into which, however, he was chiefly led by the requirements of his celebrated theory. They were certainly, at first, a remarkable order of men, whom it would be injurious to confound with their frivolous representatives in the age of Plato and Xenophon. Nevertheless, the above distinguished scholar is perhaps inclined to exaggerate their merits, since to them, in his opinion, we owe it that the great Homeric poems have come down to us. But this is taking for granted the matter in dispute between him and his opponents, who maintain that the author of the Iliad and Odyssey possessed both the knowledge and the materials for writing. He, with reason however, assumes that both theatrical and oratorical action found a way opened for them by the rhapsodic art, though its professors were neither actors nor orators, but men exercising an office connected with a peculiar state of society, and no longer existing in modern times.
It has often been supposed, grounding the opinion on a false interpretation of the word rhapsodist, that the members of this fraternity were mere compilers or patchers up of poems from fragments pilfered out of various authors. And, to augment the absurdity, the practice of a recent age has been attributed to remote antiquity, when, as some imagine, the great rhapsodists like a modern lecturer, carried about with them pictures of the subject they were upon, and pointed out to the audience with a stick[[975]] the various characters or incidents they might be describing. Another error much insisted on by Wolff, is the supposition that the Homeric poems alone were chanted by the older Rhapsodists, which no doubt is contrary to the testimony of antiquity and to common sense. For, as might naturally be concluded, not only the songs of Hesiod[[976]] and the whole epic race were thus publicly sung, but those likewise of the lyric and iambic poets, and the very laws of the state when the legislator happened to have composed them in verse. It must nevertheless be remarked, (though of this Wolff takes no notice,) that so much did recitations of Homer’s works predominate over all others, that Rhapsodists and Homerists were often regarded as synonymous terms;[[977]] and even in later ages, when at any rate the art of writing was not unknown, Demetrius Phalereus introduced upon the stage a class of reciters, who, down to the days of Athenæus, enjoyed the name of Homerists. Still, as I have observed above, the works of other good poets were at times recited, as Hesiod, Archilochos, Mimnermos, and Phocylides. Nay, the Rhapsodist Mnasion, as Lysanias relates, used to recite the Iambics of Simonides; Cleomenes, the Purifications of Empedocles, and Hegesius the comedian, the Histories of Herodotus; that is, some portions of them I presume. Certain authors delivered their own productions in this way,[[978]] as Xenophanes, who composed both epics, elegies and iambics.[[979]]
It has with reason been observed that although the name of the rhapsodic art would seem to have been invented posterior to Homer, the thing itself existed long before, and was held in greater honour than at any subsequent period. In fact, the poets of those times were themselves Rhapsodists, and for many ages the only ones, if it be true that Hesiod[[980]] was the first who reduced the chanting of other men’s poems into an art. Afterwards, from the age of Terpander the Lesbian (Olymp. 34) down to Cynæthos of Chios (Olymp. 69) supposed to have been the author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and a man of distinguished genius, the Rhapsodists sometimes chanted the poems of others, sometimes their own, and occasionally perhaps interpolated new verses into the golden relics of the past, as our modern actors often foist their one-legged jokes into the stage text of Shakespeare. There appears, however, to be no foundation for the notion, that nearly every one of these chanters was likewise a clever poet, which no ancient writer, I believe, asserts, and which the assertions of fifty would not render credible, though the probability is, that of those numerous rhapsodists some were themselves poets, and others desirous, without the genius, of being thought such; so that it is quite as likely that their vanity frequently laid claim to the works of others, where detection could be escaped, as that others were suffered to rob them of their just fame.
They who contend for the flourishing of the system of castes in Greece, would probably maintain that the Rhapsodists constituted from the first a clan, as the Homeridæ are said to have been in Chios.[[981]] Among the few arts which commanded the undivided time and study of numerous professors in those ages, that of the Aoidos or Poet, was certainly one, and that, too, the most honoured and revered. Doubtless their characters were pure and noble, to overcome the envy which superior abilities usually inspire. For whether at home or abroad, in their native cities no less than in the public assemblies, and at the festive boards of kings, they were regarded as dear to gods and venerable to men. The Rhapsodists likewise enjoyed the same estimation and led the same kind of life until other studies and other manners, with that most debasing of all passions, the love of gain, brought contempt on their profession and pursuits.[[982]]