While the action of Achilles in the Iliad is apparently assigned to Rinaldo, there is room to doubt whether Tasso meant the person or character of his hero to carry corresponding marks of resemblance. In what may be called a by-place of his poem, he has made a passing attempt to reproduce both Achilles and Ulysses under the names of Argante and Alete, who appear as envoys from the Sultan of Egypt to the Frankish camp. For the benefit of the former, Tasso has translated the two lines that describe Achilles in Horace, and has added a spice of the Virgilian Mezentius:
Impaziente, inesorabil, fero,
Nell’ arme infaticabil ed invitto,
D’ ogni Dio sprezzatore, e chi ripone
Nella spada sua legge e sua ragione1084.
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 lodi1085,’ 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 said1086, 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,
And it pronounced by the President
Though that Hector may full oft praid;
And finally, what wight that it withsaid
It was for nought, it must ben, and should,
For substaunce of the parliment it would1087.
But let us return to the so-called Shakespeare.
Thersites is converted into the modern fool. Diomed struts upon his toes, while in Homer his modesty among the Greeks is the peculiar ornament of his valour. Ajax, whom Homer has made lumpish and goodnatured, is full of haughty follies, the coxcomb of warriors; while the mere bulk which, combined with bravery and bluntness, formed his peculiar note, is made the distinctive characteristic of Achilles. It is still more grievous to find the relation of this hero to Patroclus degraded by foul insinuations, entirely foreign to the Iliad, to its author, and even to its age. Agamemnon is a mere stage king; and it can be no wonder that Nestor’s character, which requires a fine appreciation from its gently rounded construction, should have become thoroughly commonplace and vapid. The same lot befalls Ulysses, who is made to play quite a secondary part. Paris, without any mending of his moral qualities, is allowed to present a much more respectable figure: the Helen of Homer reproaches his cowardice; but here he says, ‘I would fain have armed to-day, but my Nell would not have it so1088.’ She appears as the mere adulteress; and those, who remember how she is treated in Homer, will be able to measure the declension that time and unskilled hands had wrought, when they read the speech of Diomed describing her as follows:
She’s bitter to her country: hear me, Paris!
For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian’s life hath sunk: for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain: since she could speak
She hath not given so many good words breath
As, for her, Greeks and Trojans suffered death1089.
The palm of pure heroism is now become so entirely Hector’s property, that Achilles only slays him by means of the swords of his Myrmidons, not by his own proper might; and that, too, does not happen until, wearied and disarmed, he applies to Achilles to forego his vantage1090: so that Ajax says with very great propriety indeed,
Great Hector was as good a man as he1091.
Shirley’s ‘Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,’ independently of other merits, deserves notice for a partial return towards just conception of the Homeric characters. Yet even here the claim of Ajax to the arms of Achilles is founded principally on the impeachment of Ulysses as a coward; and the reply of that chieftain rests much too exclusively on setting up his political merits and achievements, as if he were strong in no other title.
The description of Ajax may deserve to be quoted:
And now I look on Ajax Telamon,
I may compare him to some spacious building;
His body holds vast rooms of entertainment,
And lower parts maintain the offices;
Only the garret, his exalted head,
Useless for wise receipt, is fill’d with lumber.
Dryden followed Shakespeare in the portion of this field which he had selected; and cast afresh the subject of Troilus and Cressida. He departed alike from Shakespeare and from Chaucer by making Cressida prove innocent, a supposition, says Scott, no more endurable in the preceding age, than one ‘which should have exhibited Helen chaste, or Hector a coward.’ All the incongruities of Shakespeare’s play are here reproduced, including the mixture of the modern element of love with the Greek and Trojan chivalry; Ajax and Achilles are depressed to one and the same low level.
Ajax and Achilles! two mudwalls of fool,
That differ only in degrees of thickness1092,
says Thersites; and Ulysses answers in a similar strain. Troilus fairly slays Diomed in single combat, and is then himself slain by Achilles in the crowd. Hector is dispatched, behind the scenes, under the swords of a multitude of men1093.
Racine’s Andromaque and Iphigénie.
A short time before this play of Dryden’s, Racine had taken the characters of the Trojan war in hand. His ‘Andromaque’ and ‘Iphigénie,’ however, afford us no new lights, and might very well have been conceived by a person who had never read a line of Homer, though in various passages there are imitations which must have filtered from the Homeric text. He was content in general to copy the traditions as given by Euripides; and it may provoke a smile to read an apology of one of his editors, Boisjermain, for the manner in which Ulysses is handled in the ‘Iphigénie.’ Appearing, near the outset of the piece, as a personage of very high importance, he notwithstanding plays in the plot a part wholly insignificant, instead of assuming, as he does in Euripides, the important function of urging the slaughter of Iphigenia for the honour and benefit of Greece. Speaking of the critics who blame this arrangement, the editor says, they have failed to observe that Racine has adopted the jealousy and intrigues of Hermione as the prime movers against Iphigenia, and that these produce the same result as might otherwise (forsooth) have been brought about by the reasonings of Ulysses. The work of literary profanation could hardly be carried further: it was not to be thus capriciously bandied about from pillar to post, that Homer constructed his deathless masterpieces. In the ‘Andromaque,’ much as it is praised, we miss, still more egregiously than in the ‘Iphigénie,’ all the simplicity and grandeur of the Greek heroic age, and find ourselves environed by the infinite littleness of merely passionate personal intrigues, which have self only for their pole and centre. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than to see these archaic Grecian characters dressed in the very last Parisian fashions, with speech and action accordingly. The total want of breadth and depth of character, and of earnestness and resolution, as opposed to mere violence, is such that at parts of the ‘Andromaque’ we are almost compelled to ask, whether we are reading a tragedy or a burlesque? As, for instance, when, with the Sixth Iliad yet lingering upon our mental vision, we hear Andromache say to her confidante,
Tu vois le pouvoir de mes yeux1094;
and when Hermione threatens her pis-aller lover, Orestes, with respect to Pyrrhus,
S’il ne meurt aujourd’hui – je puis l’aimer demain1095.
It is here, too, that we see carried perhaps to the very highest point of exaggeration the misstatement of the relative martial merits and performances of Hector and his adversaries. The Greeks Hermione, herself a Spartan, describes as
Des peuples qui dix ans ont fui devant Hector;
Qui cent fois, effrayés de l’absence de l’Achille,
Dans leur vaisseaux brûlants ont cherché leur asyle;
Et qu’on verroit encore, sans l’appui de son fils,
Redemander Hélène aux Troyens impunis1096.
It was well that the handling of Homer should cease altogether for a time, when the characters and scenes belonging to his subject had become so thoroughly anti-Homeric, that they only falsified what they ought to have assisted to perpetuate. An interval has followed, during which they have been allowed to repose. It would be hazardous to conjecture, after the failures of so many ages, how far they can hereafter be satisfactorily reproduced. It has been reserved for Goethe, with his vigorous grasp of classical antiquity, to tread regions bordering upon that of the Iliad and Odyssey with the consciousness of a master’s power. In his ‘Iphigenie,’ for example, he has given to his scenes, events, and characters the tone and colouring, with which alone they ought to be invested. And, if the study and investigation of Homer shall henceforward be carried on with a zeal at all proportioned to the advantages of the present age, they cannot fail to accumulate materials, which it may be permitted us to hope that future genius will mould into such forms as, if only they are faithful to the spirit of their original, must alike abound in beauty, truth, and grandeur, and alike avail for the delight and the instruction of mankind.
Conclusion.
We have now walked, in the train and in the light of the great Poet of antiquity, through a long, yet, so far at least as he is a party, not a barren circuit. We have begun with his earliest legends, faintly glimmering upon us from the distance of an hundred generations. We have seen the creations of his mind live and move, breathe and almost burn before us, under the power and magic of his art. We have found him to have shaped a great and noble mould of humanity, separate indeed from our experience, but allied through a thousand channels with our sympathies. We have seen the greatness of our race at one and the same time adorned with the simplicity of its childhood, and built up in the strength of its maturity. We have seen it unfold itself in the relations of society and sex, in peace and in war, in things human and things divine; and have examined it under the varied lights of comparison and contrast. We have seen how the memory of that great age, and of its yet greater Poet, has been cherished: how the trust which he bequeathed to mankind has been acknowledged, and yet how imperfectly it has been discharged. We have striven to trace the fate of some among his greatest creations; and having accompanied them down the stream of years even to our own day, it is full time to part. Nemesis must not find me1097,
ἢ νῦν δηθύνοντ’, ἢ ὕστερον αὖθις ἰόντα.
To pass from the study of Homer to the ordinary business of the world is to step out of a palace of enchantments into the cold grey light of a polar day. But the spells, in which this sorcerer deals, have no affinity with that drug from Egypt1098, which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference: rather they are like the φάρμακον ἐσθλὸν, the remedial specific1099, which, freshening the understanding by contact with the truth and strength of nature, should both improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of duty.