The new government made an alliance with Japan and China against England and France; and William Randolph returned to the United States and became a general in command of the American army. But his failure to win victories caused his popularity to wane, and he fled to a castle he had built for himself in Mexico. The British government, enraged by what he had done to turn the Japanese emperor against them, sent emissaries to set fire to his castle, and William Randolph Alcibiades was shot while trying to make his escape from the flames.
From this career we learn that it is not enough for a statesman to be beautiful in person and charming in manner: it is also necessary that he be taught to attend Sunday school in his youth.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE AGE OF HERO-WORSHIP
Greek civilization was made by a large number of different tribes, inhabiting islands, or fertile valleys and plains separated by mountain ranges. Among these tribes there was incessant rivalry and bitter jealousy. They were never able to form a national or racial union, and their history is a succession of inter-tribal intrigues and wars. In addition to this came the class struggle. The aristocratic classes, based on landlordism, held the government, while the proletariat, crowding into the towns, clamored for power; popular leaders arose, and there were conspiracies and civic tumults. Invariably the leaders of the dispossessed party would form alliances with outside states for war upon their own state. More significant yet, some would take the money and serve the cause of the Persian kings, who represented barbarian despotism.
In the beginning of their written record we find the Greeks just emerging from the family stage. The old men ruled; they were the wise and the rich, and no one disputed their authority. They formed alliances and led expeditions for the plundering of other states; then, returning to their ancestral halls, they hired musicians to entertain them by chanting the story of their exploits. So we have the Homeric poems, ruling-class propaganda, written to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and to inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations.
Every device of the poet’s art is employed to lend prominence and splendor to the Homeric heroes. They are frequently demigods, the result of some mood of dalliance on the part of one of the high gods of Olympus, who came down to earth and encountered a lovely Greek maiden wandering in a meadow. This divine illegitimacy entitles the heroes to the center of the stage, and they take it. They are a set of extremely greedy, jealous, vain and capricious school-boys; and, what is still more significant, their gods, the highest ideal they could conceive, are exactly as greedy, jealous, vain and capricious. The only beautiful emotion in the poems is when some of the mothers and fathers, the wives and children of those heroes express for them an affection of which they are unworthy.
We are accustomed to use the words “Homeric” and “epic” to signify something vast, elemental, portentous. How is it that Homer secures to his characters this “heroic” effect? By causing all the rest of the world to bow to their pretensions, by interesting the gods in their fate—and, above all else, by portraying them as unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires. These are the familiar devices whereby aristocracy signifies itself.
And that explains why such men as Matthew Arnold and Gladstone write volumes of rhapsody over Homer. There is in England a class which has invented ways of setting forth to the world the fact that it does not have to work for a living. There are things this class can do which the vulgar herd cannot do; and one of these things is to read and appreciate Latin and Greek literature. Homer is to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British world sartorial.
Homer serves these purposes, because he has the aristocratic point of view, and gives the aristocratic mind what it craves. Just as we cherish genealogy volumes to prove that our ancestors came over in the Mayflower, so the Homeric minstrel chanted a catalogue of the ships which had taken part in the Trojan war. And just as our members of good society preach “law and order” to the lower classes, so in the Homeric poems it is made clear that the common soldier exists to shed his blood for the glory of his chief. Only once does a common man lift his voice in the “Iliad”—the famous scene in the council where Thersites dares to rise up. He is represented as a hunchbacked and offensive brawler; he is overwhelmed with ridicule, and finally receives a sound thrashing from Ulysses, called “the wily,” the Greek ideal of the shrewd and sensible man of the world. “The sovereignty of the many is not good,” declares this “wily” one; “let there be one sovereign, one king.”
We shall find that the bards of aristocracy seldom neglect to flatter their masters by showing some rebel thus being taught his place. We shall find Shakespeare treating Jack Cade precisely as Homer treats Thersites; neither stopping for a moment to inquire whether the grumbler had any just cause to grumble. We shall find also that leisure-class critics always accept these scenes as pure and undefiled “art,” and are shocked by the suggestion of their mighty minstrels stooping to propaganda in the interest of those who pay them. In those early days the pay was poor; if legend is to be trusted, Homer wandered blind and friendless among the Greek towns, which afterwards claimed the honor of being his birthplace. Says the epigram: