And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard;
To carry Nature lengths unknown before,
To give a Milton birth, asked ages more.
But this great master is also subject to undue depreciation, as well as flattered by extravagant worship. I myself have been assured in a company composed of Professors of a German University, who were ardent admirers of Shakespeare, that within the sphere of their knowledge Milton was only regarded as of equal rank with Klopstock. It is not, I trust, either national vanity or religious prejudice, nor is it the mere wonder inspired by the wide range of his attainments and performances, which makes England claim that he should be numbered in the first class of epic poets; in that class of which Homer is the head, distinguished before all competitors by a clear and even a vast superiority.
It would be difficult to institute any satisfactory comparison between Milton and Homer; so different, so wanting in points of contact, are the characters partly of the men, and even much more of their works. Perhaps the greatest and the most pervading merit of the Iliad is, its fidelity and vividness as a mirror of man and of the visible sphere in which he lived, with its infinitely varied imagery both actual and ideal. But that which most excites our admiration in Milton is the elasticity and force of genius, by which he has travelled beyond the human sphere, and bodied forth to us new worlds in the unknown, peopled with inhabitants who must be so immeasurably different from our own race. Homer’s task was one, which admitted of and received what we may call a perfect accomplishment; Milton’s was an undertaking beyond the strength of man, incapable of anything more than faint adumbration, and one of which, the more elevated the spectator’s point of view, the more keenly he must find certain defects glare upon him. The poems of Milton give us reason to think that his conceptions of character were masculine and powerful; but the subject did not admit of their being effectually tested. For his nearest approaches to perfection in his art, we must look beyond his epics.
A comparison between Milton and Dante would be somewhat more practicable, but it would not accord with the composition of the group, which I shall here attempt to present, and which has Homer for its centre. On the other hand, Dante might, far better than Milton, be compared with Homer; for while he is in the Purgatorio and Paradiso far more heavenly than Milton, he is also throughout the Divina Commedia truly and profoundly human. He is incessantly conversant with the nature and the life of man; and though for the most part he draws us, as Flaxman has drawn him, in outline only, yet by the strength and depth of his touch he has produced figures, for example, Francesca and Ugolino, that have as largely become the common property of mankind, if not as Achilles and Ulysses, yet as Lear and Hamlet. Still the theological basis, and the extra-terrene theatre, of Dante’s poem remove him to a great distance from Homer, from whom he seems to have derived little, and with whom we may therefore feel assured he could have been but little acquainted.
The poets, whom it is most natural to compare with Homer, are those who have supplied us in the greatest abundance with points of contact between their own orbits and his, and who at the same time are such manifest children of genius as to entitle them to the honour of being worsted in such a conflict. These conditions I presume to be most clearly fulfilled by Virgil and Tasso; and we may begin with the elder of the pair.
Perhaps Chapman has gone too far when he says ‘Virgil hath nothing of his own, but only elocution; his invention, matter, and form, being all Homer’s[876].’ Yet no small part of this sweeping proposition can undoubtedly be made good.
With an extraordinary amount of admitted imitation and of obvious similarity on the surface, the Æneid stands, as to almost every fundamental particular, in the strongest contrast with the Iliad. As to metre, figures, names, places, persons and times, the two works, where they do not actually concur, stand in as near relations one to another, as seem to be attainable without absolute identity of subject; yet it may be doubted whether any two great poems can be named, which are so profoundly discordant upon almost every point that touches their interior spirit; upon everything that relates to the truth of our nature, to the laws of thought and action, and to veracity in the management of the higher subjects, such as history, morality, polity, and religion.