If in the Jerusalem the Wrath is beneath the standard of the Iliad, so is the Return. On the side of Rinaldo, indeed, it is most just and right, that he should be extricated from the entanglements of the seductive Armida: but, on the side of Godfrey, there is the same sorry management of all the moral elements of the case. In Homer, Achilles was justly and most deeply offended: on every principle known to the creed of Paganism, or to Greek life and experience, he justly resented the offence: the utmost that can be imputed to him is a decided excess in the indulgence of a thoroughly righteous feeling: and this was terribly expiated by the bloody death of that friend, who was to him as a second self. But the gross offence of Agamemnon is dealt with according to the most righteous rules; and he is compelled by word and gift to appease the man whom he had robbed, insulted, and striven to degrade. While he is brought both to restitution and to apology, how different is the arrangement of Tasso’s poem! Rinaldo was wronged by Gernando: but Godfrey had done no more than his duty: he was the minister of public justice, of lawful authority, and of military discipline: in respect to him, and likewise in respect to the army, Rinaldo was the offender, Godfrey and public right were only the sufferers; yet Godfrey and public right give way under the pressure of adversity, and the offender comes back in a kind of triumph.
If it has been found possible in the case of Virgil to institute a more minute comparison with Homer, this cannot be attempted in the case of Tasso, for his work hardly admits of juxta-positions in detail. We have already noticed the abundant stock of real analogies between the subject of the Trojan expedition, and that of the Crusades. Tasso himself, in his anxiety to follow Homer, even added to them, by feigning a centralization of the Christian enterprise, which I fear did not really exist. But to imitate is one thing, to be like is another; and it still remains hard really to compare the poems, far harder the poets. In order to see this clearly, let us ascend a height, and view the scene which lies before us. How vast a deluge of time and of events has swept away the very world in which Homer lived, and the worlds that succeeded his: the place of nativity is changed, the great gulf of time is stretched between, the language is another, the religion new, all the chains of association have been taken to pieces and re-forged, all the old chords of feeling are now mute, and others that give forth a different music are strung in their stead. And there is also, it must be confessed, a great and sharp descent from the stature of Homer, as a creative poet, to that of Tasso. Yet he too is a classic of Italy, and a classic of the world; and if for a moment we feel it a disparagement to his country that she suffers in this one comparison, let her soothe her ruffled recollection by the consciousness, that though Tasso has not become a rival to Homer, yet he shares this failure with every epic writer of every land. On the other hand, no modern poet, dealing with similar subject-matter, has been equal to Tasso. None has erected, upon similar foundations to his, a fabric so lofty and so durable, so rich in beauty and in grace: so well entitled, if not to vie with the very greatest achievement of the ages that went before him, at least to challenge or to win the admiration of those generations that have succeeded. But his defeat is, after all, his greatest victory. To lose the match against Homer is a higher prize than to win it from his other competitors. Few indeed are the sons of genius, and elect among the elect, who can be brought into comparison with that sire and king of verse; and Tasso, we are persuaded, would bear against none a grudge for thus far, in his own words, limiting his honours:
e ciò fia sommo onore;
Questi già con Gernando in gara venne[973].
SECTION VI.
Some principal Homeric characters in Troy. Hector: Helen: Paris.
To one only among the countless millions of human beings has it been given to draw characters, by the strength of his own individual hand, in lines of such force and vigour, that they have become, from his day to our own, the common inheritance of civilized man. That one is Homer. Ever since his time, besides finding his way into the usually impenetrable East, he has provided literary capital and available stock in trade for reciters and hearers, for authors and readers of all times and of all places within the limits of the Western world;
Adjice Mæoniden, a quo, ceu fonte perenni,
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.
Like the sun, which furnishes with its light the close courts and alleys of London, while himself unseen by their inhabitants, Homer has supplied with the illumination of his ideas millions of minds that were never brought into direct contact with his works, and even millions more, that have hardly been aware of his existence. As the full flow of his genius has opened itself out into ten thousand irrigating channels by successive subdivision, there can be no cause for wonder, if some of them have not preserved the pellucid clearness of the stream. Like blood from the great artery of the heart of man, as it returns through innumerable veins, it is gradually darkened in its flow. The very universality of the tradition has multiplied the causes of corruption. That which, as to documents, is a guarantee, because their errors correct one another, as to ideas is a new source of danger, because every thing depends upon constant reference to the finer touches of an original, which has escaped from view. And this universality is his alone. An Englishman may pardonably think that his great rival in the portraiture of character is Shakespeare—a Briton may even go further, and challenge, on behalf of Sir Walter Scott, a place in this princely choir, second to no other person but these. Yet the fame of Hamlet, Othello, Lady Macbeth, or Falstaff, and much more that of Varney, or Ravenswood, or Caleb Balderston, or Meg Merrilies, has not yet come, and may never come, to be a world-wide fame. On the other hand, that distinction has long been inalienably secured to every character of the first class, who appears in the Homeric poems. He has conferred upon them a deathless inheritance.