No such excess of muscular power as this is ascribed to Achilles; and yet a much more lively impression of grandeur in his martial character is left upon the mind of the reader; the fact being that mere exaggeration freezes, while the adjusted representation of greatness warms.
The largest size assigned by Homer to any even of his mythological personages who are in relations with man, and this only in the Shades below, is in the case of Otus and Ephialtes. At nine years old, when they were put to death, they were nine cubits broad, nine fathoms (fifty-four feet) high[956]. These were they, who piled the mountains up to heaven. They are among the few figures absolutely gigantic, which appear in Homer; but they hover only in the distance through the mists of the Under-world, and in describing even them he has adhered strictly to the limits of what may be termed the gigantesque. Further on, he describes Tityus as reaching over nine acres; but he nowhere presents any such person to us in active motion, or in any relation with man on earth. In Il. xxi. however, occurs a passage which it is more easy to impugn; for Mars, who had marched about among the Trojans and the Greeks in battle without driving either friends or foes from their propriety by his bulk, and had fought with Diomed in the plain of Troy on terms favourable to that hero, when overthrown by Minerva in the battle of the gods, covers seven acres (407). Although Homer has skilfully avoided localizing the conflict, this may be thought to wear the aspect of a poetical incongruity; because in the Mars of the Theomachy we cannot wholly forget the Mars of the plain. As a general rule, however, Homer does not employ vast size, except in cases where it can suggest no comparison with objects of ordinary dimensions, and where, accordingly, it in no way jars with our customary standard.
But if there be incongruity in the dimensions of the prostrate Mars of Homer, what shall we say to Tasso, who, carefully setting out in detail that his infernal assembly is held within the four walls of the palace of Pluto, describes the sub-terranean monarch, when he sits in actual council, as exceeding in mass, and that immeasurably, any mountain whatever?
Nè tanto scoglio in mar, nè rupe alpestra,
Nè pur Calpe s’ innalza, o ’l magno Atlante,
Ch’ anzi lui non paresse un picciol colle[957].
Thus, where Homer is in excess, Tasso multiplies upon him by a thousandfold. This is not grandeur, but extravagance; nor is it vastness, but indistinctness, of which an impression is left upon the mind. The passage is followed by a description of the countenance and gorge of Pluto, which all readers must remember, but which all readers must likewise wish they could forget. In general it is curious to compare the very sparing use which Homer has made of mere bulk as a poetical engine, with the boundless redundance of it, not only even to nausea in such writers as Fortiguerra, who vulgarize everything they touch, but even in a patriarch of Italian romance like Bojardo.
It would not, however, repay the trouble to be entailed by the perusal, were I to draw out in detail a comparison between the diction, taste, figures, and all other incidents of poetic handling, in Tasso, and those of Homer. It is better to direct attention to what more easily admits of being brought into juxtaposition—that is, the general structure and movement of the poems, and the manner in which the greater laws of the poetic art are applied to the respective subjects.
Mr. Hallam adopts an opinion of Voltaire, that in the choice of his subject Tasso has been superior to Homer; and adds, that ‘in the variety of occurrences, in the change of scenes and images, and of the trains of sentiment connected with them in the reader’s mind, we cannot place the Iliad on a level with the Jerusalem;’ that, by unity of subject and place, the poem of Tasso has a coherence and singleness not to be found in the Æneid; and that, while we expect the victory of the Christians, ‘we acknowledge the probability and adequacy of the events that delay it[958].’
Of the Italians themselves, some place the work of Tasso at the very head of all Epic compositions: others maintain, that it was surpassed by the Orlando Furioso. Tiraboschi, while declining to weigh the poems against each other generally, yet compares the poets, and gives the higher place to Ariosto[959]. Neither the agitated, struggling, and dependent life of Tasso, nor the character of the time in which he lived, were favourable to the attainment of the very summit of poetic excellence. The freshness of the morning of Christian civilization in Italy had worn away. The romantic poetry, which seemed so congenial to that country, and which had attained to such high perfection, had now run its course: it was rather an effort against nature, than a movement in the line of it, when Tasso wrought upon a subject which required him to bridle his country’s freer Muse, and train her to historic grandeur and severity. He has left us the undoubted work of a great mind, adorned with abundant and, in some respects, extraordinary beauties; yet many would own themselves not to have experienced from the Jerusalem that peculiar sort of satisfaction, which any work of simple tenour, if nearly approaching perfection in its kind, even though that kind be somewhat below the epic, never fails to impart to the mass of its readers.