In the Homeric poems themselves we discover abundant proofs of the high honour in which the professors of the poetical art were held by their countrymen. They fulfilled in Greece[[983]] the office performed among the Hebrews by the Schools of the Prophets,[[984]] or the solitary possessors of the vaticinatory power who revealed to their countrymen the will of heaven, and taught by what practices it might be propitiated. Some institution of this kind probably existed, as I have already observed, from the very dawn of civilisation which it principally created. Most princes, like Agamemnon, Alcinoüs and Odysseus, retained in their palaces a man at once their chaplain and their laureate, who, when guests foreign or domestic assembled at their board, might administer instruction and delight, by chanting the praises of the gods, the exploits or greatness of their ancestors, or even by delivering precepts in morals or the useful arts. To a poet, also, as to the holiest of guardians, kings entrusted the care of their wives and families,[[985]] when departing on distant expeditions; and so great was the veneration paid to their character, that we find Clytemnæstra banishing the poet before she dares to become the paramour of Ægisthos.
But those men of great original genius whose fame spread rapidly, and who probably found superior enjoyment in the independence of a wandering life, not content with the patronage of a single prince, or the admiration of a single people, moved perpetually from land to land, enhancing at once their glory and experience. We in fact discover in Homer, Pindar, and other original poets proofs that the flowers from which they collected the honey of their melodies grew not all on one spot. Odysseus was a type of the bard who sang his adventures, and looking still further back we find the Thracian Thamyris, whom the Muses were said to have punished for his vanity, penetrating into the obscurest parts of Peloponnesos, protected by the sanctity of his character and the reverence due to his profession.[[986]]
With respect to Homer, both ancient tradition and the form and spirit of his poems, require us to consider him in this light, though there is no ground for supposing him with Payne Knight to have celebrated the different heroes of Greece for the purpose of ingratiating himself with their descendants.
Those writers who imagine the works of Homer to have been composed fortuitously by a club of poets, all actuated by a blind instinct to produce a number of parts which, when completed, should fit as well together as the several members of a statue, are necessarily desirous to establish two points: first, that the Aoidoi recited their works from memory, and that because, secondly, the art of writing was unknown. By far too much ingenuity has already been expended on this question to allow it to be any longer tempting from its novelty. Wolff and Heyne have obtained all the credit they sought by their visionary hypothesis, and the echoes of their scepticism are not yet silenced in the academies and universities. The argument, derived from the practice of the Rhapsodists, of repeating from memory, is attended by two inconveniences: first, it cannot be shown that the order arose before the art of writing was common; second, these recitations were equally made from memory, not only in the age of Pericles, but down to the latest period of their flourishing. It may, therefore, without the slightest risk to the argument, be granted the academic sceptics that the Rhapsodists recited from memory, even when we know with certainty that they learned the poems from written copies.
To render more credible the notion that the art of writing in the age of Homer was not yet known, great stress is laid on the powers of memory in certain individuals, though from these nothing can in reality be inferred, except, that when necessary, men can certainly remember a great deal. It matters little, however, for my present purpose, whether the Iliad and Odyssey were written by one man or by a hundred; the grandeur of the poetry remains, and to it as a great fountain-head may be traced several principal streams of Hellenic civilisation.
Plato, indeed, who laboured so assiduously in enlarging the empire and corroborating the powers of the human understanding, at times maintained the fancy that little benefit had been conferred on Greece by her bard. He observes, but in a manner so ironical that it is difficult to determine his meaning, that if Homer and Hesiod had possessed the gift of improving their contemporaries in virtue they would never have been suffered to wander about chanting their poems. People, he thinks, would have constrained them by benefits to remain with them, or, not succeeding in this, would have quitted their homes to attend their footsteps, as in his age many did in the case of the sophists.[[987]]
At the same time he admits the general opinion to have been that Homer was the great preceptor of Hellas, who taught the sciences of politics and ethics, together with the whole discipline and economy of human life.[[988]] Perhaps, notwithstanding his great wisdom and his genius, he looked upon the question from a wrong point of view, regarding poetry as the rival rather than the precursor of philosophy. The mission of the former had, however, in his time been in a great measure accomplished, as far, I mean, as concerned positive teaching; and he did not consider that as civilisation advances and materialises nations the curb of poetry is the more required to check their downward tendencies, and direct their head towards the skies. The object of poetry is to keep alive in the human breast the love of whatever is noble and beautiful, to dazzle the worldling from the worship of gold by showing him something more glorious than anything that gold can purchase, to accomplish the apotheosis of pure affection, of virtue, of disinterestedness, of great passions, of patriotism,—and in Homer all this is effected with a spontaneous energy, which like the ocean appears equal to bear the whole weight of humanity clothed with all its attributes upon its breast.
Greece has no poet worthy to be compared with our Shakespeare and our Milton but Homer, who possesses some advantages over them both. Shakespeare, buoyant and full of life as was his spirit, felt evidently the waves of his imagination lapse at times from about him and leave his mind stranded and bare on the shores of the immeasurable universe. Melancholy creeps over him, like a black vapour, concealing the Titanian head wont to tower above the region of the clouds. Even over Milton’s soul, serene in its fiery brightness as it usually is, I think I discover something which at times obscures his faith in himself and human nature, and produces a flagging of the fancy. But in Homer this never appears. Cheerfully and joyously he pursues his course with eternal sunshine on his brow, and a heart beating full and true, as if the life of all the world were within him. There is no end of his vitality. He seems as if he could never grow old. His strength is inexhaustible. Equal to whatever may happen, he nowhere seems to be hurried by his subject, or compelled to strain a nerve to accomplish what he desires. In himself he appears happy as a god, and only to sympathise in human suffering from the boundlessness of his charity. He comes forth as the sun in the morning, full of brightness, showing all the tears that sprinkle the earth and drying them too, but shedding none. We call him old, though in reality he is all youthfulness and love. Every function of life goes on harmoniously in his frame. He enjoys whatever nature brings within the circle of his experience. He drinks in with rapture the freshness of dawn,—basks smilingly in the blaze of noon,—welcomes the stillness of evening—the solemn grandeur of night. Sleep, too, has for him inexpressible charms, and on the pleasures we taste among its bowers he has bestowed every grateful, every endearing epithet. Milton is far more spiritual, and careers in a course nearer the stars. Shakespeare, in his metaphysical subtlety and yearning to pierce beyond the grave, suggests stranger thoughts, and calls up a wilder world of fancies. But Homer, as if admitted behind the veil, never doubts for a moment. Habitually, too, his thoughts are of action, of man as he is, of the virtue of the citizen, of the soldier, of the husband, of the father, of the son, of the wife. He loved the world and all that it contains. His eye could detect beauty where the atrabilious sceptic beholds nothing but deformity.
Hence the universal fame and admiration of his writings. For, wherever a well-spring of delight exists, the world will discover it and have recourse to it for ever. The tragic poets who took up his mantle differed widely from him both in temper and character. The experiment of civilisation had been tried, and been the cause of less happiness than at the outset it seemed to promise. A spirit of dissatisfaction had consequently grown up in society, which, shaken by convulsions within and assaulted from without by storms, appeared to be fast resolving into its original elements. Upon the minds of the tragic poets there accordingly fell a gloomy shadow. They looked backwards and around them, and were saddened by the view of terrible pictures which the dark pencil of Fate was constantly filling up. The inexplicable influence of events upon the inner organisation of man had caused them too, and their contemporaries equally, to delight in gloom, in slaughter, in revenge, in exhibitions of suffering, analogous in many cases to what they beheld their countrymen inflict upon each other.
Observe the creations of Æschylus:[[989]] in them, pregnant all with Miltonic haughtiness, energy, grandeur, we already discover symptoms of profound discontent with the character of actual existence and an invincible yearning towards the past. He seemed desirous to haunt the imaginations of his contemporaries with gigantic phantoms, quarried out of the wrecks of a vanished ethical system, in which such greatness found congeniality and sympathy. His ideas seemed to clothe themselves spontaneously in language of massive structure, like a Cyclopean wall, such as before or since no man ever used. He projected himself by the force of meditation into the heroic spheres, conversed there with mighty shades, acquired among them stern principles of action, of thought, of belief, of composition; and with these he sought to inspire the men of his own time. His object seems less to delight than to overawe, to persuade than to command. His ideas move along the highest arch of imagination which spans the universe from pole to pole, or rise out of a sea of darkness which they illuminate for a moment like lightning flashes in their passage.