The Press. — London, England, 1857-04-25 00:00:00

APRIL 25, 1857. Nittraturt. Oxford Essays. Contributed by Members of the University. 1857. London : J. W. Parker and Son. THE excellence of the plan adopted by the founders of this publication becomes more and more apparent with each successive volume. Not a single essay in the number now before us but is evidently a labour of love, and written with that carefulness of style and fulness of matter which those who bind themselves to illustrate only the tepics of the day are seldom enabled to exhibit For depth of thought and closeneßs of argument the two foremost on the list are Mr. Gladstone's essay upon Homer, and Mr. Wilson's, of St. John's College, upon "Schemes of Christian Com prehension," followed at no long interval by Mr. Baden Powell on " The Evidences of Natural Theology." For elegance of style Mr. Duff's paper upon Sicily carries off the palm. Mr. Church and Mr. Sellar have each illus trated a favourite author with an impartial and discerning hand; and the part of historic investigation is worthily sustained by Messrs. Freeman and Bridges in their respective articles upon " Ancient Greece and Mediaeval Italy," and " The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages." We are far from meaning that the essays are separately faultless : in the course of our observations we shall have to point out several blemishes of more or less consequence. But nevertheless we do mean that, on the whole, in the Oxford Essays for 1857 is to be found a body of sound learning, conscientious opinion, and sagacious criticism, which we should vainly hope to parallel else where in our periodical literature. If any fault can be found with Mr. Glad stone's luminous dissertation, it is that of being too completely workmanlike. It is as difficult to abbreviate as a proposition in Eu clid. It contains not a superfluous word, nor a single ornament. It is sheer bone and muscle ; close, symmetrical argument, without one divergence or irregularity. It has been called indeed, and with some propriety, a skeleton ; but then it is a complete skeleton, and does not merit the epithet •` fragmentary" bestowed on it in the same quarter. Of the value of Homer to the student of man's history Mr. Gladstone says : In much that this Homeric world exhibits we see the taint of sin at work, but far as yet from its perfect work and its ripeness ; it stands between Paradise and the vices of later heathenism, far from both, from the latter as well as from the former; and if, among all earthly knowledge, the knowledge of man be that which we should chiefly court, and if to be genuine it should be founded upon experience, bow is it possible to overvalue this representation of the human race in a complete, distinct, and separate form, with its own religion, ethics, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the standard of its nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the Creator, yet mature, full, and finished, in its own sense, after its own laws, like some masterpiece of the sculptor's art? The poems sof Homer never can be put in competition with the sacred writings of the Old Testament, as regards the one invaluable code of truth and hope that was con tained in them. But, while the Jewish records exhibit to us the link between man and the other world in the ear liest time 4, the poems of Homer show us the being of whom God was pleased to be thus mindful, in the free unsuspecting play of his actual nature. The patriarchal and Jewish dispensations created, and sustained through Divine interposition, a state of things essentially special and exceptional ; but here we see our kind set to work out for itself, under the lights which common life and experience supplied, the deep problem of its destiny. Nor is there, perhaps, any more solemn and melancholy lesson than that which is to be learned from its continual down ward course. If these words amount to a begging of the question, at least it is most important for us to know whether its coarse was continually downwards ; whether, as man enlarged his powers and his resources, he went farther from his happiness and his perfection. Now this inquiry cannot, for Europe and Christendom at least, be satisfactorily conducted, except in commencing from the basis which the Homeric poems supply. A great deal of the essay may be said to follow from the propositions here laid down. It follows that the study of "the inner Homeric world " should be brought up to a level with that of his poetry and his language, and that we should bring all our learning and judgment to bear upon the question of what the poet's own " historic aims " actually were. The chief excellences of Homer's poetry are characterised by Mr. Gladstone in the following terms : Among them might perhaps be placed the faculty of high oratory ; the use of epithets and distinctiTe phrases ; the THE PRESS. production of indirect or negative effects ; and the power of creating and sustaining dramatic interest without the large use of wicked agents, in whom later poets have found their most indispensable auxiliaries. We are not sure that Mr. Gladstone has not stated the last of these merits a little too boldly. Do not Paris and Agamemnon in the Iliad, and the nobles of Ithaca in the Odyssey, to a great extent play the part of wicked agents? They are at least as wicked as any of the agents in the dEneid, and we are to con sider that a distinct power of evil residing in a supernatural person was foreign to clas• sical conceptions. In the importance assigned to Homer as an educational work, even on the ground of his poetry alone, and in the com parison drawn between him and the trage dians, we cordially agree with Mr. Gladstone, and sincerely trust that his suggestions may gain attention, at all events, from his own University. Of Homer as an historical authority, Mr. Gladstone intimates that the opinion of scho lars has generally been too low. The follow ing remarks are exceedingly sensible : But, first of all, may we not ask from whence comes the presumption against Homer as an historical authority? Not from the fact that he mixes marvels with common erents ; for this, to quote no other instance, would destroy along with him Herodotus. Does it not arise from this— that his compositions are poetical—that history has long ceased to adopt the poetical form—that an old association has thus been dissolved—that a new and adverse associa tion has taken its place, which connects poetry with fiction —and that we illogically reflect this modern association upon early times, to which it is utterly inapplicable? He then proceeds to show from internal evidence that Homer evidently intended his poems to serve also the secondary purpose of chronicles. He comments especially on his catalogues, genealogies, geographical notices, and long and apparently irrelevant episodes. We now pass on to the date of Homer, and the remoteness or contiguity of his age to the Heroic period. Here Mr. Gladstone must speak for himself : I would presume to argue thus : that Homer never would have ventured to dispense with mere description, and to adopt Action as his sole resource—to dramatise his poem au he hag dramatised it—unless he had been strong in the consciousness of this identity. It is no answer to say that later writers—namely, the tragedians—dramatised the subject still more, and presented their characters on the stage without even those slender aids from narrative towards the comprehension of them which Homer has, here and there at any rate, permitted himself to use. For the consequence has been, in their case, that they entirely fail to represent the semblance of a picture of the heivic age, or indeed of any age at all. They produce remote occurrences or fables in a dress of feelings, language, and manners suited to their own time, as far as it is suited to any. Besides, as dramatists they had immense aids and advantages of other kinds. But Homer has enjoyed no aid of accessories, and has, notwithstanding, painted the life : and yet, seeking to paint from the life, he commits it to his characters to paint themselves and one another. Surely, he never could have confined himself to this indi• rect process, unless be had felt his own essential unity with them all. He would have done as most other epic poets have done, whose personages we feel that we know, not from themselves, but from what the poet in the cha racter of intelligencer has been kind enough to tell us; whereas we learn Achilles by means of Achilles, Ulysses by means of Ulysses, and so with the rest. But the assumption by an effort of mind of the manners and tone of a remote age, and the consistent support of this character throughout prolonged works, is of very rare occurrence. In Greek literature there is, to my knowledge, no example of it ; and this I think may fairly be urged as nearly conclusive against ascribing it to Homer. The tragedians in whose compositions we should chiefly look for it do not apparently so much as attempt it; and it is most difficult to suppose a poet so national as Homer to be in this cardinal respect entirely different from all others of his race. May we not, however, go a good deal further, and say boldly that the faculty of assuming in literary compositions an archaic costume, voice, and manner, does not belong at all either to an age like that of Homer, or to any age of which the ►iterary conditions at all resemble it? In the first place, an inventor, working like Homer for the general public, must, by departing altogether from the modes of thought, expression, and action current in his own day, pro tont° lose his hold upon those on whose ap proval he depends. It seems to follow that this will not be seriously attempted, except in an age which has ceased to afford a liberal supply of the materials of romance. Is not this presumption made good by experience ? The Greek tragedians, it is indisputable, did not find it neces sary to aim, and did not aim at reproducing the whole contemporary apparatus which was in strictness appro priate and due to their characters. Virgil made no such attempt in the " £neid," of which, notwithstanding, the manners abound in anachronisms. The romance poets of Italy idealise their subject, not, however, by the revival of antique manners in all their incidents, but by means of an abundant preternatural machinery. In Shakspear's King John, Henry IV., or Henry VIII., how little difference can be detected from the Elizabethan age, or (in this point) 411 from one another. Again, in Macbeth or Lear, enough is done to prevent our utterly confounding their ages with the common life of the hearers; but there is nothing that approaches to a complete or elaborate representation of the time to which the personages are supposed to belong. So again in Coriolanus, Julius Cesar, or Antony and Cleo patra, there is a sort of Roman toga thrown loosely over the figures ; but we do not feel ourselves amidst Roman life when we read them. And, in truth, what is done at all in these cases is not done so much by reprolucing as by generalising, in the same sense as a painter generalises his draperies. A great instance of the genuine process of reproduction is to be found in Sir Walter Scott; but he, besides being a man of powerful genius, cut not in the mould of his own age but in one essentially belonging to the past, was a master of antiquarian knowledge. And this leads me to name what seems to he the second condition of serious and successful attempts (I need not here speak of burlesques, of which all the touches must be broad ones) at disinterring and reviving bygone ages in the whole circle and incidents of their life. The first, as has been already said. is to live in an age itself socially old, so as not to abound in proper materials for high invention. The second is to live in an age possessed of such abundant documents and records of a former time as to make it practicable to explore it in all points by historical . data. As in romance and poetry, so in the progress of the drama, this method appears to be the business of a late age. The strength of dramatic imagination is always when the drama itself is young. It then confidently relies upon its essential elements for the necessary illusion, and knows little, and cares less, about sustaining it by elaborate attention ta minor emblems and incidents. But when it has lived into the old age of a civilised society, when the critical faculty has become strong and the imagination weak, then it strengthens itself by minute accuracy in scenery and costume,—in fact, by exact reproduction. We have sometimes thought that in determin ing the age of Homer enough importance has scarcely been attributed to that tone of senti mentalism which is frequently observable in his poems, and which is characteristic of an age of more or less civilisation. The poets of a rude era do not moralise upon death and fate as Homer does, compare the generations of men to the leaves of the forest, or give such reasons for fighting bravely as are assigned by Sarpedon to Glaucus. But perhaps it is in the passages treating of the trustworthiness of the text and the preservation of Homer among the ancients. that the peculiar intensitiveness of Mr. Glad stone's mind and the force of his analytic faculty is most fully displayed. We allude especially to his mode of examining those scraps of evidence which remain to us from ancient writers upon this subject. A good specimen is his treatment of the passage in Herodotus relating to Clisthenes : Of these, the next, and a most !important one, is the statement of Herodotus respecting Clisthenes the ruler of Sicyon, who, when he bad been at war with Argos. pa.{ ulovs iravcri :v ZixtNivi clywqfcreat, TL:Jv 'Opolpsioa. tirfyy avezar., OT/ • Aivtioi TS "Aiyoc Tir irox>ol irrivra eqhvierrets. He proceeds to say, that clisthenes sought to banish the memory of Adrastus, as being an Argive hero, from Sicyon. It is not necessary to inquire what these Homeric poems may have included; bat the argument of Grote that they were " the ' Thebais ' and the ' Epigoni,' nut the ' Iliad,'' seems to me fallacious. Nor is it con ect that the " Iliad " fails to supply matter to which the statement may refer. The national honour of Argos in the " Iliad," it here the name it bears is so nearly associated with the chief seat of power, and becomes representative of the whole Hellenic race in its heroic infancy, is infinitely higher than any local fame it could derive from the civil feud with Thebes. The " Iliad," too, marks most clearly both the connection of Adrastus with Argos—for it makes Diemed his sonin-law—and the subordinate position of Sicyon— 0' 4; 'ASocrzo; ;148scrix:viv— by making it a mere town in the dominions of Agamemnon, while Argos figures as a sovereign and powerful city. There is therefore a uple room to doubt whether Herodotus had the " Thebais " or " Epigoni " before him in the phrase " Homeric poems." But the importance of the passage is not wholly dependent on these considerations. It shows That there were, at Sicyon, State recitations of Homer six centuries before the Christian era, attended with rewards for the successful performers. That these recitations were in conformity with common use; for they are named as something ordinary and estab lished, which was then set aside not as a custom peculiar to Sicyon. That the recitations depended upon the Homeric poems, since they were entirely stopped on accpunt of exceptionable matter which the Homeric poems were deemed to contain. That these recitations were in the nature of competitive contests among the rhapsodists, when the best and most approved, of course, would obtain prizes. This implies that the recitations were not single, as if by poet laureates, but that many shared in them. This short Greek sentence is thus inten•o• gated as it were by the magician, and com pelled to give up an amount of evidence which the ordinary critic would never have sn:s. peoted it to contain.