and, notwithstanding the brilliant successes of Achilles, dis tinctly announced his opinion, confirmed by the old prophecy of Calchas, that Troy could not be taken till the tenth year, and then rather by fraud than by force. This counsel, of course, would be opposed by the impetuous Pelidan, and after his death by the impetuosity of his like tempered son; but the whole course of events would prove that Ulysses was right. Him a poet with a true epic instinct would constantly have kept in view, as the real hero of the 'Ixiov Tépois. But instead of this we have a mere chronological succession of events, a narrative poem in fourteen books, without a subject, without a hero, without a catastrophe, or, to use Aristotle's phrase, a series without beginning, middle, or end. The writer plainly did not know that the fall of Troy was his subject, for he does not enunciate this theme, but runs on exactly from the point where Homer stopped, as a man would take up the broken thread of an old chronicle, and ends, not where he should have ended, with the captured city and the roar of midnight conflagration, but with the dispersion of the Greek armament on their return home, and the ruin of the Locrian Ajax by the thunderbolt of Jove, in the hands of his flashing-eyed daughter. Thus, to crown the ten years' siege, instead of a Te Deum the natural conclusion of a long war-we have a shipwreck and a general submersion; and before the proper catastrophe of the action has time to sink into our soul, with all its striking scenes and all its solemn lessons, we are hurried off into a series of new catastrophes, arising out of a new action, and producing diverse and altogether discordant emotions. Unity of action here there is none; as little is there any prominence given to one hero above another; but they come forward like puppets, one after the other, grandly dressed, and with a loud flourish of trumpets and QUINTUS SMYRN.EUS. 293 fine speeches in their mouth, knock down their men and depart. All this because the author, though possessed of a rich store of epic materials--no doubt in great part the very same which floated about the coasts of Asia Minor in Homer's day-though a fluent versifier, well read in Homer, and not without a certain eye for the poetry of rural life, was not an epic poet; did not possess a constructive mind. Here, as elsewhere, we see exemplified the wisdom of the sage of Clazomenæ, who taught that the only active principle which can explain the existence of a world is MIND. And in those little imitative worlds made by men, which we call works of art, whether it be the joining of hewn stones in an air-poised dome, or the grouping of figures in a historical picture, or the cunning interaction of different persons towards the accomplishment of one issue in a clever novel, in all such cases it is the constant presence and supervision of mind which makes coherent structure possible. The absence of this peculiar order and imperial quality of mind in the poet of the Post-Homerica,' has given us a mere external · concatenation of warlike events, embraced within certain arbitrary limits of space and time; its presence in the poet of the Iliad has given us a work of art, an epic poem. DISSERTATION VIII. WHAT HOMER WAS TO THE GREEKS. THE estimation in which a great writer is held by the people to whom he belongs, is a fact of scarcely less importance than the intrinsic value of the writings themselves. By the admiration with which they combine to regard him, they put the stamp of nationality on his productions, and make them rank as a prominent element, not merely in the written record of intellectual exhibition, but in the busy history of the human race. Of this, the place that Shakspeare holds in England, Robert Burns in Scotland, and Goethe in Germany, are significant examples. As action and character are the main strength of Shakspeare's dramas, so in English life and English writing, these are the most strongly pronounced and the most effective features at the present day; the humour, the fervour, the direct manly vigour, and the simple natural pathos of Burns, still remain the most attractive elements in the character of those Scots whom happy circumstance or strength of character has preserved from the contagious influence of numbers, rank, wealth, refinement, and luxury in the South; and if the Germans with one voice resist the British tendency of preferring Schiller to Goethe, we may be assured it is because they know, by a sure instinct, that the works of the great Frankfort poet exhibit some characteristic virtue of their German life, which we proud and ESTIMATION OF HOMER. 295 prejudiced islanders have neither the desire to appreciate nor the capacity to comprehend. So, if Massillon and Voi taire, after nearly two centuries of very different phases of intellectual life, still remain great, and among the greatest names in French estimation, it is because the modern French, like the ancient Greeks, are more than anything else a witty and an eloquent people, and will not allow to sink into a subordinate place, in their national opinion, writers in whom the most characteristic excellences of the national intellect are so brilliantly displayed. In like mauner, if it be a fact that the whole cultivated people of Greece, from the earliest ages of their youthful blossoming to the ripe harvest of their accomplished manhood, and the sere leaf of their late decay, assigned to Homer a place among their representative men, and spoke of his works in terms of love and reverence such as they apply to no other writings, there is a significance in this fact which no student of the poet can overlook. That there may have been a large amount of exaggeration, and a certain admixture of ignorant misapprehension in their unanimous popular verdict, is likely enough, nay, certain, but does not diminish the importance of the general fact. All passion in its very nature exaggerates, and hero worship cannot exist without in some sort transcending the bounds of sober judgment; but sensible men naturally make allowance for this, and the Apollo of the Vatican remains a noble figure, though every man may not feel the god in his nostrils quite so strongly as Winckelmann did. Abstract what we will from the high terms of transcendental eulogy in which the wisest Greeks and the most judicious Romans speak of the singer of the Iliad, there still remains enough to show that we have a man before us not belonging to the common rank and file of famous literary men, but somehow or other, standing with a peculiar headship over his people, as Moses did over the Hebrews, or as Luther does over the Protestant Churches, and Bacon over those who prosecute the peculiar researches of modern physical science. As a literary name there is none in modern times that surpasses, or even approaches, Shakspeare; but Homer was greater than Shakspeare, I do not say in poetical genius, but in national significance certainly, and in popular influence, for a reason that we shall presently perceive. I have thought it right, therefore, to devote a special chapter to this point, not only for its singular significance in the history of the human intellect, but because of the important argument thence derived for the historical reality of the poet, and the strong guarantee afforded of the authenticity of his transmitted works. Men do not readily fall into rapturous admiration of an altogether fictitious character; and when they have fixed their worship on a real hero, they will not let the registered memorials of his wisdom slip through their fingers like an ephemeral pamphlet, or be hawked through the streets unsought after, like the leaves of an ephemeral ballad. They will put their stamp upon the genuine currency, besides knowing by the ring of it how to distinguish the true from the false coin. The mere familiar appellation with which Homer is generally quoted by the Greek writers, indicates a sort of preeminence which, perhaps, has never been accorded to any other national poet in the same way. The personal name is sunk altogether, and they call him simply o oinτns—the poet. "Homerus, propter excellentiam, commune poetarum nomen effecit apud Græcos suum," as Cicero has it. The " Top. xiii. So Justinian: Quo- subauditur apud Græcos egregius Hoties non addimus nomen cujus sit civi- merus, apud nos Virgilius."-Institut. tatis, nostrum jus dicimus; sicuti cum poetam dicimus nec addimus nomen 1. 2. 2. |