The Press. — London, England, 1858-05-01 00:00:00

Xittraturt. Stidia on Homer and the Homeric Age. By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, D.C.L., M.P. for the University of Oxford. Oxford : University Press. (Second Notice.) Ma. GLADSTONE'S speculations upon the history of Greece during the Homeric age appeared to us to be vitiated by the character of the historian upon whose statements they depend. When he proceeds in his second volume to discuss the religion of Greece during the heroic age, we find another objection of the same compzehensive character forbidding our assent to his principal hypothesis. Both in ethnology and mythology Mr. Gladstone rows against the stream of fashion. While other seholars are still discussing whether or no Homer ever had an existence, our author has satisfied himself that not only the poet but even the heroes did really exist. So also at a time when critics are in the habit of deriding the theory that mythologies are corruptions of a primeval revelation, Mr. Gladstone boldly revives it, cites Bishop Horsley's hypo thesis about the Sibylline Books as if it were generally accepted, and maintains that Zeus, Apollo, and Pallas Ithenc„idjured together in the often recurring line— eti I:evr±h: xre. .15.7vrein xiic 'AroXXO), are, in a distorted form, neither more nor less than God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It is not, however, because these doctrines are not in fashion that we object to them. The scholars who have exploded them have not yet replaced them by anything so satisfac tory as to silence every appeal from their deci sion. Nor do we object to the supposed cor ruption of primeval revealed verities on the ground that such corruption is impossible. On the contrary, we have before our eyes an 'example of the process by which a simple and spiritual creed may be transformed into a gross and grotesque mythology. Those of our great-grandchildren who may chance to travel to the Salt Lake, will perhaps hardly recognize in the polytheism they may find flourishing there the disjecta membra of English Chris tianity and science. But we object, first, that if Greek mythology presents such a case of corruption, it is impossible to prove it; and, secondly, that the principal in stance adduced of a correspondence between Greek mythology and revelation is in the highest degree unsatisfactory and unfor tunate. Mr. Gladstone's whole argument depends upon an assumption which is implied throughout his dissertation, and is more than once explicitly stated. This assumption is that in Homer's time the world was young ; that the corruption of man had not then - vitally affected his spiritual life ; that, though banished from Paradise. he still, as it were, felt himself a citizen of it—still in his exile eemembered the ways, and the simplicity and the savour of the bliss of that earliest home We are afraid that this pretty theory is merely a mistake in figures. In the time of Homer the earth was three thousand years old. It is true that we know little of what passed on it during those three thousand years ; but what little we do know would lead us to the conclu sion that the growth of wickedness was at least as portentous in those ages as it has been since. We hear tales of grinding tyranny, grovelling idolatry, unnatural and promiscuous lust. If the records of those three millenniums could be recovered, we have no reason to doubt that they would be similar in purport to the chronicles of the second half of the world's life. They would tell us of the growth of vast Mesopotamnian and Egyptian monarchies ; of short periods of heroic energy in action, in inquiry, and fancy ; followed by periods of wealth, comfort, enlargement of mind, then by a certain sense of repletion, by a suspension of activity, a palsy numbing the fancy, a scep ticism vexing the intellect, a consciousness of decrepitude begun, an idle melancholy, a hope less admiration of the past. This process, so familiar to the student of modern history, had place, doubtless, in the times preceding Homer; the rise and fall of dynasties, con- THE PRESS, MAY 1, 1853. quests, subjugation of ancient and illustrious races, revolutions in religion, science, and art, had been going on then, as they have been going on now, for immemorial ages ; and ►nan was no nearer to paradisiacal innocence then than he is now ; nay, he was not so near, for then he had only a dim tradition of that pri mitive state, whereas now he has an historical monument of it. Is there not, then, a childlike simplicity in the style of Homer which we do not trace in later writers ? Certainly there is ; but it is the childhood of the Greek nation only, and not of the world, which finds a voice in Homer. The same childish simplicity reappears in the " Niebelungen Lied " and the " Chansons de Geste," which notwithstanding are modern, compared, we do not say with Homer, but with some of the most artificial writers who have ever lived—with Plato and Cicero. The child hood of a nation does not in any manner depend on the childhood of the world. A na tion divided by geographical barriers from other nations, and wanting the means of trans mitting accurately to each succeeding age the deeds of that which went before, if at last it give signs of vitality, commonly exhibits in its first movements this childlike innocence and simplicity. For if the first settlers brought with them any knowledge or enlightenment, some of this, as it is perpetuated by no alpha- bet, is lost in each generation, and what re mains is retained with a blind and unreason ing tenacity, so that when such a people takes its place at last in the family of nations, it shows like a Squire Western among the Lon doners—strong, simple, utterly ignorant, go verned iu action by impulse, and in belief by tradition. Such, probably, are the Russian peasantry at this day, nut less than the Greeks of Homer's time ; such, more or less, are the peasantry of every country. Their simplicity may be more or less amiable and attractive, according to the character of the nation; it has no concern with the childhood of the world, nor with the historical paradise, yet it may in a very just sense be called paradisiacal, inasmuch as it is often virtuous from habit without any deliberate choice of virtue, and truly wise without any knowledge of good and evil. Mr. Gladstone's assumption, therefore, that Homer was likely to preserve some primeval traditions because he lived in the childhood of the world before the paradisiacal revela tions were forgotten, or the paradisiacal inno cence utterly corrupted, is unwarranted. In Homer's time the world was old, and probably at. least as corrupt as now; while, in the absence of records, the sources of primitive truth were probably further from him than from us. But what is the doctrine thus supposed to have been handed down from Paradise ? It is the doctrine of the Trinity, and of the double nature of the Messiah. Mr. Gladstone goes so far as to say that all the genealogical and mythological details relating to Jupiter, Minerva, and Apollo are so many rude attempts to grasp the doctrine, " One alto. " gether ; not by confusion of substance, but " by unity of Person." We scarcely know how to treat this easy, unhesitating assumption of the truth of the extravagant theory of South, that " Aristotle was but the rubbish of Adam, and "Athens but the rudiments of Paradise" For ourselves, it would seem quite sufficient to observe—though we are conscious that such an objection will seem of small account indeed to a speculator of Mr. Gladstone's temper — that this view of the paradisiacal state is alto gether unsustained by evidence ; that neither in Scripture nor anywhere else is it hinted to us that Adam was acquainted with the Athatia sian Creed ; that, on the contrary, the high doc trines in question are represented as being revealed to men by very slow degrees, and as only completely disclosed in the incarnation of Christ. But. at any rate, it deserves notice that, if Mr. Gladstone be fight, the Greeks must be held to have preserved from Paradise a greater amount of theological truth, if in a less pure state, than the Jews recovered by revelation from above. The germs of the doc trine of the Trinity may possibly be detected in the Old Testament, but in the poems of Homer, according to Mr. Gladstone, the doc --------,__- _.— trine itself appears full bl own, and is ex . pounded, thougu in mythi ca l f orms, yet with Athauasian accuracy. The double na t ure of Christ appears to be darkly hi nte d at by the Jewish prophets, but Homer, it seems, cou ld have passed au examination in the mystery before Justinian and his bishops. 'We are very ready to admit the force of the acute arguments by which Mr. Gladstone establishes the generical difference and supe• riority of the two deities Apollo and Pallas Athene to the other Olympians. That dif ference is too conspicuous to be passed over by the most superficial reader of Homer and of the other Greek poets. Every one must bo struck by the correspondence of the epithets which they apply to Apollo to those which wo apply to Christ. He is called zao; , vi n or Healer, wiaci,:crio; or Purifier, irio,i,cr;,; .I , i; or Revealer of the will of Jove. Eve r y one must be struck by the sublime picture of Pallas Athene in the Odyssey, acting as a present Paraclete or Inspirer and Comforter to her favoured hero : or yri.i aov i";;Et 054; isvcipavia pt)Jurres; xtiv# isvci+orS'm iraFicrTevro Ila:XXes; Mr. Gladstone has shown how deeply felt and how well sustained by the poet is this character of either deity. 'We accept the fact as we find it, but we do not refer it either with some writers to an altogether conjectural and unsupported connection between Greece and Palestine, or with Mr. Gladstone to a still more conjectural and unsupported communi. cation between Greece and Paradise. Of the origin of the tradition we neither know nor can know anything ; but if we want a reason why the Greek imagination clung to it with so much more tenacity and religion than to the rest of the Greek theology, it is surely sufficient to observe that truth commonly wears better than fiction ; is more credible ; answers the facts better. Plain men, says Aristotle, as a general rule hit the truth. This maxim duly meditated may both give us the reason we want, and may, on the other hand, confirm our faith in orthodox Chris tianity, when we consider that plain men in Greece, before St. Paul preached there, had been in the habit of worshipping three Persons united in will. We have quarrelled long enough with Mr. Gladstone, and must not take our leave of him without commending more at length the chaste eloquence of his style. We have been particularly struck with the exquisitely hippy metaphors which seem always at his com mand at those points where an inferior writer would have been driven to laborious and un satisfactory circumlocutions. The following are some examples of this peculiar skill Take, for instance, time, ocean, earth, sun, moon, stars, air; all these prime natural objects and agents are either not personified at all in Homer, or so indistinctly and mutely personified that they are the were zoophytes of his supernatural world, of which the gorgeous life and brillitur. movement .are sustained by a sepsrste set of characters. Rarely indeed, in reflective and critical periods, does it happen that mall can keep a log-book of wind, weather. and progress for the mind, or tell from what qusrter of the heavens have proceeded the gales that impel it on its course. Speaking of the exposition of Greek theology attempted by the Neo-Platonists, he says : Even that corrupt and wicked system had, as it were, its epoch of death-bed repentance. We have selected as a specimen of Mr. Gladstone's usual manner the following pic ture of the best side of the manners of Homer 's time : The youth of high birth, not then so widely as now separated from the low, is educated under tutors in rev& rence for his parents, and in desire to emulate tLeir fame; he shares in manly and in graceful snorts, acquires the use of arms, hardens himself in the pursuit, then of all others the most indispensable, the hunting down of wild beasts, gains the knowledge of medicine, probably also of the lyre. Sometimes, with many-sided intelligence, he even sets himself to learn how to build his own house or ship, or how to drive the plough firm and straight down the furrow, as well as to reap the standing corn. And wire n scarcely a man, he bears arms for his country or his t ribe, takes part in its government, learns by direct instruction and by practice how to rule nisnkind through the nse . of reasoning and persuasive power in political assemblies, attends and assists in sacrifices to the gods. For all this time he has been in kindly and free relations, bu not only with his parents, his family, his equals of his own age, t with the attendants, although they are bat serfs, who have known him from infancy on his father's domain. He is indeed mistaught with reference to the strong hand. Human life is cheap; so cheap that even a mild 414 ~. .•