In later times, the traditions of Orpheus, Musæus, and Eumolpus, always Θρῇκες, supported the tradition which derives Greek song from the mountain tribes.
Why has Arcadia a muse of her own, but because the Pelasgian poetry is not the Hellic? and does not the reputed character of that muse oblige us to assign a Hellic origin to the higher national poetry?
Hesiod, as author of the Works and Days, is so enormously different from Homer in his frame of mind, as well as his diction, that it is hard to trace, even in the most general form, a complete national affinity between them. The Theogony, by its subject, brought him nearer to Homer, but it is quite destitute of the heroic power and fire: a calm and low-toned beauty, as in the legend of the Ages, is all to which Hesiod ever rises. To my conjecture, he seems to personify the one-stringed instrument which might suffice for Pelasgian song: while the Diapason of Homer, embracing with its immeasurable sweep things small and things great, things sublime and things homely, all objects that human experience had suggested, and all thoughts that the soul of man had imagined or received, presents to us that Greek mind, full, varied, energetic, lively, profound, exact, which was destined to give form for so many ages to the genius of the world.
I cannot however part from this subject, and leave the Hellenic races in possession of the honour of having principally contributed to mould the powerful imagination of the Greeks, without noticing the opposite conclusion of Mr. Fergusson, in his admirable ‘Handbook of Architecture.’
He treats the Greek nation as made up chiefly of two ingredients, the Dorian and the Pelasgian. He takes the Greeks of the Trojan Epoch to have been Pelasgian, and so to have continued until the return of the Heraclidæ. Then, according to him, began the Hellenic, which he treats as synonymous with the Doric, preponderance; and, having Sparta before him as the one great Hellic type, he observes that the race was far better adapted “for the arts of war and self-government, than for the softer arts of poetry and peace[588].”
But the supposition of a Pelasgic supremacy in Homeric Greece, is contrary to all the evidence afforded by the text of Homer, and, I think we may add, to the belief alike of ancient and of modern times. Even the limited part of the Homeric evidence which is connected with the names Ἕλλας and Ἕλληνες, seems large enough to overthrow any such hypothesis. Though the Dorian race was Hellenic, it was apparently a late outgrowth from the stock, and has no pretension whatever to be considered as the universal type of its products. In Sparta, the excessive development of policy was doubtless unfavourable to human excellence in other forms; among others, to poetry and art. Still, neither verse, music, nor architecture are disconnected from the Dorian name and race. It seems quite impossible to refer the war-poetry of the Iliad, the grandest in the world, for its origin to a people so unwarlike, in reference especially to the changeful, romantic, and poetic side of war, as the Pelasgi.
The adventurous tone and tenour of the Odyssey, and its wide range over the world, and over the sea, are as little in keeping with what we can see of Pelasgic habits in the heroic age. Above all, that largeness and unimpaired universality of type, which belongs to human character as drawn by Homer, and especially to Achilles and Ulysses, demonstrate (I cannot use a weaker word) that all the materials of Grecian greatness were in his time fully ripened.
Pelasgian sense of beauty.
At the same time it is not necessary to deny, that the Pelasgians may have been endowed with a high sense of beauty. Not that Homer appears to have had a vivid conception of beauty in connection with architecture, their great reputed accomplishment; for he seems, on the contrary, to have had little idea of ornament in buildings, beyond the blaze of plates of polished metal: far different here from what he shows himself to be in dealing with dress, or armour, or the forms of men and horses. But we have before us the fact that through Athens itself preeminently, and likewise through its colonies to the east, the Greek race earned in after-times the very highest honours in poetry and the fine arts. On the one hand, however, a large share of these honours, especially in early times, fell to the share of the race called Æolian, which was clearly Hellic, and a principal part of the Hellic family. On the other hand, Arcadia, which remained more purely Pelasgian, while Athens received all sorts of mixtures, never attained to high distinction in art, nor rose above a modest and tranquil strain of verse. The great tragedians and the great artists were of a race the most composite in all Greece. The natural inference would seem to be, that whatever the Pelasgians may have contributed to the general result, however they may have afforded for poetry and art (as also they did for war) a good raw material, it was only when in combination with other elements from other sources, that they could attain to great practical excellence. A lively sense of beauty is, doubtless, not only a condition, but even a foundation: yet a great organising power is as necessary for the production of the great works of imagination, as it was to Lycurgus for the Spartan constitution, or to Aristotle for philosophical analysis and construction; and this was the commanding and sovereign faculty in a mind such as that of Homer.
The connection between the Homeric Greeks and the traditions of huntsmen is, I think, sufficiently evident from Homer. His hunting legends, and the multitude of his hunting similes, are so many signs of it; and many indications, I think, concur towards forming a belief that the Greeks owed their fondness for the chace to their Hellic, not to their Pelasgic habits and blood.