ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδὸν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων[949]·
in the names he assigns to them, where they were not historical characters, Δημόδοκος, and Φήμιος Τερπιάδης; in the moral uprightness with which he invests them; for, though it was the office of Phemius to delight, his heart was never with the licentious and guilty band that held the palace of Ulysses:
ὅς ῥ’ ἤειδε μετὰ μνηστῆρσιν ἀνάγκῃ[950].
And again, in the offices of guardianship which they exercised; for Agamemnon, when he left his home for Troy, carefully enjoined upon the bard of his palace the care of Clytemnestra; and his advice, with her own right sense, for a time stood her in good stead[951]. Such was the bard in the living description of Homer; such he was represented in the Poet himself, never thrust into view, but ever understood, ever perceived, through his works. On the other hand, the character of the bard, as exhibited in Virgil, is what may be termed professional: the fire and power of genius may be in him, but they must work only under conventional forms, and for ends prescribed according to the spirit of that lower and narrower utility which is, not logically perhaps, but yet very effectively, denominated utilitarianism. A remarkably high form of exterior art, with a radical inattention to substance, both of facts and laws, has been the result in the case of Virgil. And it is rather significant, that this great Poet has nowhere placed upon his canvass the figure of the bard amidst the abodes of man; as if the very type had perished from the earth in those degenerate days, and the memory of him could not be recalled. An effete and corrupted age could no longer conceive a mind like the mind of Homer; an Æolian harp so finely strung, that it answers to the faintest movement of the air by a proportionate vibration: with every stronger current its music rises, along an almost immeasurable scale, which begins with the lowest and softest whisper, and ends in the full swell of the organ.
Change in the idea of the Poet’s office.
By a false association of ideas, we have come to place accuracy and genius in antagonism to one another. It is Homer who may best undeceive us: except indeed that most complete solution which the mind gladly perceives when, ascending to the Author of all being, it finds in Him alone the source and the perfection, alike of Order and of Light; alike of the most minute, and of the most gigantic operations. But among men Homer best exemplifies this union. It is not indeed the precision of dry facts, terminating upon itself: it is the precision of sympathies, of sympathies with nature and with man, to which the minute and scrupulous adjustments of Homer are to be referred; and this precision is probably due by no means to conscious effort, but to the spontaneous operations of the soul. In this view his far-famed, but not even yet fully fathomed, accuracy is no deduction from his greatness, but is in truth a proof of the near approach to perfection in the organization of his faculties. The later poets have too often torn asunder, what in him was harmoniously combined. They have conferred upon their art a deadly gift, in claiming first an exemption ad libitum from the laws, not only of dry fact, but of Truth in its higher sense, of harmony and self-consistency, and of all, except a merely external beauty, which was meant to be the vehicle and not the substitute for all those great and discarded qualities. In this work of laceration, Virgil has borne no secondary share.
Upon the whole, though it is doubtless natural that Virgil should be compared with Homer, the mind is astonished at finding that he should so often even have gained a preference. We may account for his being chosen as Dante’s guide, by their being countrymen, and by the almost universal ignorance of Greek when Dante wrote. It is far more staggering to find Saint Augustine emphatically call him[952] Poeta magnus omniumque præclarissimus atque optimus; for he was no stranger to Greek influences, inasmuch as the philosophy of Plato had a very high place in his estimation[953]. Nor can this be readily accounted for, except by the advantage which Virgil had through writing in the Latin tongue, and by the very great decay of poetical tastes and perceptions.
Still let us not do wrong to the memory of him, who thrilled with an immeasurable love, as he bore the sacred vessels of the Muses; and who has received so unequivocally the seal of that approbation of mankind, prolonged through ages, which comes near to an infallible award. It is but fair to admit, that we must not measure the relative rank of Homer and Virgil simply by the comparative merits of their epic works. Homer lived in the genial and joyous youth of a poetic nation and a poetic religion, and amid the influences of the soul of freedom: Virgil among a people always matter-of-fact rather than poetical, in an age and a court where the heart and its emotions were chilled, where liberty was dead, where religion was a mockery, and the whole higher material of his art had passed from freshness into the sear and yellow leaf. Whether Virgil, if he had lived the life of Homer in Homer’s country and Homer’s time, could have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, may be more than doubtful; but it is indisputably clear that Homer could not have produced them, if it had been his misfortune to live at the date and in the sphere of Virgil.
I pass on now to make some attempt at comparison between the work of Tasso and the Iliad of Homer. But although the relation between the subjects appears to recommend the choice of Tasso for this purpose rather than any other Italian poet, I have to confess, that as far as the qualities of the men are concerned, both Bojardo and Ariosto are in my estimation more Homeric than Tasso; as being nearer to nature in its truest sense, as not conveying the same impression of perpetual effort and elaboration, as exempt from the temptation to the conceits so unhappily frequent in the Gerusalemme, and generally as working with a freer and broader touch, and exhibiting a more vigorous and elastic movement.
The War of Troy and the Crusades.