D’ ogni Dio sprezzatore, e chi ripone
Nella spada sua legge e sua ragione[1084].
Accordingly, Argante proves to be the prime warrior on the Pagan side, and his character, described in these lines, is consistently carried through.
It is perhaps not to be regretted, that Tasso has left on record no other mark that Achilles was in his mind; for it is only the most debased edition of Achilles to whom Argante bears the slightest resemblance. The same is the case with Alete. Of humble origin, he rises to high honours by his powers of invention and of speech, and by the pliability of his character. Prompt in fiction, adroit in laying snares, a master of the disguised calumnies ‘che sono accuse, e pajon lodi[1085],’ he evidently recalls the caricatures, which for two thousand years had circulated under the name of the Homeric Ulysses. Thus Tasso’s acquaintance with the text, whatever it may have been, did not avail to open his eyes, darkened by corrupt tradition, or to bring him nearer to the truth as regarded those sovereign creations of the genius of Homer. So sure it is, both in this and in other matters, that when long-established falsehoods have had habitual and undisturbed possession of the public mind, they form an atmosphere which we inhale long before consciousness begins. Hence the spurious colours with which we have thus been surreptitiously imbued, long survive the power, or even the act, of recurrence to the original standards. For that recurrence rarely takes place with such a concentration of the mind as is necessary in order to the double process, first, of disentangling itself from the snares of a false conception, and secondly, of building up for itself, and this too from the very ground, a true one.
Shakespeare and Chaucer.
In the Troilus and Cressida, of which Shakespeare had at least a share, we see, perhaps, one of the lowest and latest pictures of mere mediæval Homerism. The sun of the ancient criticism had set; that of the modern had not risen. It must be admitted that, in this play, although it shows the clear handiwork of Shakespeare in some splendid passages, and much of beautiful and of characteristic diction, we scarcely find one single living trait of the father of all bards preserved. Our incomparable dramatist, by no fault of his own, came in at the very end of that depraved lineage of copyists, for which progressive degeneracy is the necessary law. As is said[1086], he followed Lydgate; Lydgate drew from a Guido of Messina, who in the thirteenth century founded himself on Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius.
Before his time Chaucer, we may presume, had drawn from the same sources. Yet his poem of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ bears a token of the familiarity of the English mind with free institutions under the Plantagenets. The fidelity with which traditions are preserved, and also the facility with which they are revived, no doubt often depends more upon moral sympathies, than upon any cause operating simply through the intellect of man. Though dealing with un-Homeric persons, or events, or both, and copying again from copies probably very corrupt, yet Chaucer, as an Englishman accustomed to English ideas of government, brings out with much more freshness and freedom the notion of public deliberation in Troy, (nay, even the very word parliament is not wanting,) than do the poets of the literary age of Greece.
For which delibered was by Parliment
For Antenor to yielden out Cresside,