It is true, as to the charge of domestic licence, so exactly does the parallel run between old Greece and old England, I find one exception to it, in each country: and that one, a Romance-critic would shew himself very uncourteous, if he did not take a pleasure to celebrate. Guy, the renowned earl of Warwick, old stories say, returned from the holy wars to his lady in the disguise of a pilgrim or beggar, as Ulysses did to Penelope. What the suspicions were of the Knight and the Hero, the contrivance itself but too plainly declares. But their fears were groundless in both cases. Only the Knight seems to have had the advantage of the Prince of Ithaca: for, instead of rioting suitors to drive out of his castle, he had only to contemplate his good lady in the peaceful and pious office of distributing daily alms to XIII poor men.
No conclusion, however, is to be drawn from a single instance; and, in general, it is said, the adventurers into the Holy Land could no more depend on the fidelity of their spouses, than of their vassals. So that, in all respects, Jerusalem was to the European, what Troy had been to the Grecian heroes. And, though the Odyssey found no rival among the Gothic poems, you will think it natural enough from these corresponding circumstances, that Tasso’s immortal work should be planned upon the model of the Iliad.
LETTER VI.
Let it be no surprise to you that, in the close of my last Letter, I presumed to bring the Gierusalemme liberata into competition with the Iliad.
So far as the heroic and Gothic manners are the same, the pictures of each, if well taken, must be equally entertaining. But I go further, and maintain that the circumstances, in which they differ, are clearly to the advantage of the Gothic designers.
You see, my purpose is to lead you from this forgotten Chivalry to a more amusing subject; I mean, the Poetry we still read, though it was founded upon it.
Much has been said, and with great truth, of the felicity of Homer’s age, for poetical manners. But, as Homer was a citizen of the world, when he had seen in Greece, on the one hand, the manners he has described, could he, on the other hand, have seen in the West the manners of the feudal ages, I make no doubt but he would certainly have preferred the latter. And the grounds of this preference would, I suppose, have been, “the improved gallantry of the Gothic knights; and the superior solemnity of their superstitions.”
If any great poet, like Homer, had flourished in these times, and given the feudal manners from the life (for, after all, Spenser and Tasso came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed); this preference, I persuade myself, had been very sensible. But their fortune was not so happy:
——omnes illacrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longâ
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
As it is, we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real genius, from the rude sketches we have of it in the old Romancers. And it is but looking into any of them to be convinced, that the Gallantry, which inspired the feudal times, was of a nature to furnish the poet with finer scenes and subjects of description in every view, than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian.