These are two advantages, in comparison with all other history whatever, which have crowned the Jewish History with mysterious glory, and of these the pupil should be warned in her introductory lesson. The first is: that the Jewish annals open by one whole millennium before all other human records. Full a thousand years had the chronicles of the Hebrew nation been in motion and unfolding that sublime story, fitter for the lyre and the tumultuous organ, than for unimpassioned recitation, before the earliest whispers of the historic muse began to stir in any other land. Amongst Pagan nations, Greece was the very foremost to attempt that almost impracticable object under an imperfect civilization—the art of fixing in forms not perishable, and of transmitting to distant generations, her social revolutions.[22] She wanted paper through her earlier periods, she wanted typographic art, she wanted, above all, other resources for such a purpose—the art of reading as a national accomplishment. How could people record freely and fervently, with Hebrew rapture, those events which must be painfully chiselled out in marble, or expensively ploughed and furrowed into brazen tablets? What freedom to the motions of human passion, where an extra word or two of description must be purchased by a day's labour? But, above all, what motive could exist for the accumulation or the adequate diffusion of records, howsoever inscribed, on slabs of marble or of bronze, on leather, or plates of wood, whilst as yet no general machinery of education had popularized the art of reading? Until the age of Pericles each separate Grecian city could hardly have furnished three citizens on an average able to read. Amongst a people so illiterate, how could manuscripts or manusculpts excite the interest which is necessary to their conservation? Of what value would a shipload of harps prove to a people unacquainted with the science or the practical art of music? Too much or too little interest alike defeat this primary purpose of the record. Records must be self-conservative before they can be applied to the conservation of events. Amongst ourselves the black-letter records of English heroes by Grafton and Hollinshed, of English voyagers by Hakluyt, of English martyrs by Fox, perished in a very unusual proportion by excessive use through successive generations of readers: but amongst the Greeks they would have perished by neglect. The too much of the English usage and the too little of the Grecian would have tended to the same result. Books and the art of reading must ever be powerful re-agents—each upon the other: until books were multiplied, there could be no general accomplishment of reading. Until the accomplishment was taken up into the system of education, books insculptured by painful elaboration upon costly substances must be too much regarded as jewellery to obtain a domestic value for the mass.
The problem, therefore, was a hard one for Greece—to devise any art, power or machinery for fixing and propagating the great memorials of things and persons. Each generation as it succeeded would more and more furnish subjects for the recording pen of History, yet each in turn was compelled to see them slipping away like pearls from a fractured necklace. It seems easy, but in practice it must be nearly impossible, to take aim, as it were, at a remote generation—to send a sealed letter down to a posterity two centuries removed—or by any human resources, under the Grecian conditions of the case, to have a chance of clearing that vast bridgeless gulf which separates the present from the far-off ages of perfect civilization. Maddening it must have been to know by their own experience, derived from the far-off past, that no monuments had much chance of duration, except precisely those small ones of medals and sculptured gems, which, if durable by metallic substance and interesting by intrinsic value, were in the same degree more liable to loss by shipwreck, fire, or other accidents applying to portable things, but above all furnished no field for more than an intense abstractiveness. The Iliad arose, as we shall say, a thousand years before Christ, consequently it bisected precisely the Hebrew history which arose two thousand years before the same era. Now the Iliad was the very first historic record of the Greeks, and it was followed at intervals by many other such sections of history, in the shape of Nostoi, poems on the homeward adventures of the Greek heroes returning from Troy, or of Cyclical Poems taking a more comprehensive range of action from the same times, filling up the interspace of 555 years between this memorable record of the one great Pagan Crusade[23] at the one limit, and the first Greek prose history—that of Herodotus—at the lower limit. Even through a space of 555 years subsequent to the Iliad, which has the triple honour of being the earliest Greek book, the earliest Greek poem, the earliest Greek history, we see the Grecian annals but imperfectly sustained; legends treated with a legendary variety; romances embroidered with romantic embellishments; poems, which, if Greek narrative poetry allowed of but little fiction and sternly rejected all pure invention, yet originally rested upon semi-fabulous and mythological marvels, and were thus far poetic in the basis, that when they durst not invent they could still garble by poetical selection where they chose; and thus far lying—that if they were compelled to conform themselves to the popular traditions which must naturally rest upon a pedestal of fact, it was fact as seen through an atmosphere of superstition, and imperceptibly modified by priestly arts.
The sum, therefore, of our review is, that one thousand [1,000] years b.c. did the earliest Grecian record appear, being also the earliest Greek poem, and this poem being the earliest Greek book; secondly, that for the five-hundred-and-fifty-five [555] years subsequent to the earliest record, did the same legendary form of historic composition continue to subsist. On the other hand, as a striking antithesis to this Grecian condition of history, we find amongst the Hebrews a circumstantial deduction of their annals from the very nativity of their nation—that is, from the birth of the Patriarch Isaac, or, more strictly, of his son the Patriarch Jacob—down to the captivity of the two tribes, their restoration by Cyrus, and the dedication of the Second Temple. This Second Temple brings us abreast of Herodotus, the first Greek historian. Fable with the Greeks is not yet distinguished from fact, but a sense of the distinction is becoming clearer.
The privileged use of the word Crusade, which we have ventured to make with reference to the first great outburst of Greek enthusiasm, suggests a grand distinction, which may not unreasonably claim some illustration, so deep does it reach in exhibiting the contrast between the character of the early annals of the Hebrews and those of every other early nation.
Galilee and Joppa, and Nazareth, Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives—what a host of phantoms, what a resurrection from the graves of twelve and thirteen centuries for the least reflecting of the army, had his mission connected him no further with these objects than as a traveller passing amongst them. But when the nature of his service was considered, the purposes with which he allied himself, and the vindicating which he supported, many times as a volunteer—the dullest natures must have been penetrated, the lowest exalted.[24]
To this grand passion of religious enthusiasm stands opposed, according to the general persuasion, the passion, equally exalted, or equally open to exaltation, of love. 'So the whole ear of Denmark is abused.' Love, chivalrous love, love in its noblest forms, was a passion unknown to the Greeks; as we may well suppose in a country where woman was not honoured, not esteemed, not treated with the confidence which is the basis of all female dignity. However, this subject I shall leave untouched: simply reminding the reader that even conceding for a moment so monstrous an impossibility as that pure chivalrous love, as it exists under Christian institutions, could have had an existence in the Greece of 1000 b.c.; the more elevated, the more tender it was, the less fitted it could be for the coarse air of a camp. The holy sepulchre would command reverence, and the expression of reverence, from the lowest sutler of the camp; but we may easily imagine what coarse jests would eternally surround the name of Helen amongst the Greek soldiery, and everything connected with the cause which drew them into the field.
Yet even this coarse travesty of a noble passion was a higher motive than the Greeks really obeyed in the war with Troy. England, it has been sometimes said, went to war with Spain, during George II.'s reign, on account of Capt. Jenkins's ears, which a brutal Spanish officer, in the cowardly abuse of his power, had nailed to the mast. And if she did, the cause was a noble one, however unsuitably expounded by its outward heraldry. There the cause was noble, though the outward sign was below its dignity. But in the Iliad, if we may give that name to the total expedition against Troy and the Troad, the relations were precisely inverted. Its outward sign, its ostensible purpose, was noble: for it was woman. But the real and sincere motive which collected fifty thousand Grecians under one common banner, was (I am well assured upon meditation) money—money, and money's worth. No less motive in that age was adequate to the effect. Helen was, assuredly, no such prize considering her damaged reputation and other circumstances. Revenge might intermingle in a very small proportion with the general principle of the war; as to the oath and its obligation, which is supposed to have bound over the princes of Greece: that I suppose to be mere cant; for how many princes were present in the field that never could have been suitors to Helen, nor parties to the oath? Do we suppose old Nestor to have been one? A young gentleman 'rising' 99, as the horse-jockeys say; or by some reckonings, 113! No, plunder was the object.
The truth was this—the plain historic truth for any man not wilfully blind—Greece was miserably poor; that we know by what we find five centuries after, when she must, like other people who find little else to do, have somewhat bettered her condition. Troy and the Troad were redundantly rich; it was their great crime to be so. Already the western coast of Asia Minor was probably studded with Greek colonies, standing in close connection with the great capitals on the Euphrates or the Tigris, and sharing in the luxurious wealth of the great capitals on the Euphrates or the Tigris. Mitford most justly explained the secret history of Cæsar's expedition to England out of his wish to find a new slave country.[25] And after all the romantic views of the Grecian expedition to the Troad, I am satisfied we should look for its true solution in the Greek poverty and the wealth—both locally concentrated and portable—of the Trojans. Land or cities were things too much diffused: and even the son of Peleus or of Telamon could not put them into his pocket. But golden tripods, purple hangings or robes, fine horses, and beautiful female slaves could be found over the Hellespont. Helen, the materia litis, the subject of quarrel on its earliest pretence, could not be much improved by a ten years' blockade. But thousands of more youthful Helens were doubtless carried back to Greece. And in this prospect of booty most assuredly lay the unromantic motive of the sole romantic expedition amongst the Greeks.