Chapter XX: Part 20

It would not, however, repay the trouble to be entailed by the perusal, were I to draw out in detail a comparison between the diction, taste, figures, and all other incidents of poetic handling, in Tasso, and those of Homer. It is better to direct attention to what more easily admits of being brought into juxtaposition--that is, the general structure and movement of the poems, and the manner in which the greater laws of the poetic art are applied to the respective subjects.

Mr. Hallam adopts an opinion of Voltaire, that in the choice of his subject Tasso has been superior to Homer; and adds, that ‘in the variety of occurrences, in the change of scenes and images, and of the trains of sentiment connected with them in the reader’s mind, we cannot place the Iliad on a level with the Jerusalem;’ that, by unity of subject and place, the poem of Tasso has a coherence and singleness not to be found in the Æneid; and that, while we expect the victory of the Christians, ‘we acknowledge the probability and adequacy of the events that delay it[958].’

[958] Hallam’s Literature of Europe, ii. 268.

Of the Italians themselves, some place the work of Tasso at the very head of all Epic compositions: others maintain, that it was surpassed by the Orlando Furioso. Tiraboschi, while declining to weigh the poems against each other generally, yet compares the poets, and gives the higher place to Ariosto[959]. Neither the agitated, struggling, and dependent life of Tasso, nor the character of the time in which he lived, were favourable to the attainment of the very summit of poetic excellence. The freshness of the morning of Christian civilization in Italy had worn away. The romantic poetry, which seemed so congenial to that country, and which had attained to such high perfection, had now run its course: it was rather an effort against nature, than a movement in the line of it, when Tasso wrought upon a subject which required him to bridle his country’s freer Muse, and train her to historic grandeur and severity. He has left us the undoubted work of a great mind, adorned with abundant and, in some respects, extraordinary beauties; yet many would own themselves not to have experienced from the Jerusalem that peculiar sort of satisfaction, which any work of simple tenour, if nearly approaching perfection in its kind, even though that kind be somewhat below the epic, never fails to impart to the mass of its readers.

[959] Lett. Ital., vol. vii.

Granting it to be true, that the Siege of Jerusalem is a nobler subject than the Wrath of Achilles, together with all that it includes of the siege of Troy, yet neither is the Siege of Jerusalem, with the high elements it comprehends, really the staple of the subject matter of Tasso, nor is the Siege of Troy the real subject of the poem of Homer. Tasso had evidently studied with attention the Iliad as well as the Æneid; and he has taken largely from, or worked largely after, both, but a great deal more, as far as I have seen, from the former than the latter. In which selection, doubtless, he chose well. The copy of a copy is pretty sure to be a vulgar work. Without noticing at present anything except what governs the main action, it may be observed, that the Wrath of Achilles is reproduced in the Offence, given and taken, of Rinaldo: and the relation of the one to Godfrey is evidently suggested by that of the other to Agamemnon.

~_Achilles the subject of the Iliad._~

It is needful here to return to a topic, which I have already more lightly touched. We may reckon it among the chief distinctions of Homer, that he has been able to make of the individual man the broad basis of the most heroical among epic songs. The weak thread of the Æneid is really sustained by something that lies behind the figure of Æneas, namely, by its hanging on the splendid fortunes of Rome; the Odyssey is toned more nearly to the colour of a domestic painting; but in the Iliad, the man Achilles is the power whose action propels, and whose inaction stops, the world-wide conflict before Troy. The Poet has accomplished this great feat by dint of powers, that have given to the character of his hero on the one hand dimensions absolutely colossal, and, on the other, the finest lines that miniature itself could require.

For efforts of such a range as this, after-poets had not the necessary strength. They had not such command over the high-born material, of which man is formed, as to make their mode of treating it in one single figure the main stake, on which the fortune of their entire works was to depend. Men like Tasso sought and found a basis, less elevated indeed and splendid, but equally solid, and far more accessible, in the great events of history, or in the multitude of associations, alike noble and familiar, which belonged to them. These, which with Homer had been organically, and not mechanically alone, grouped about the one great Humanity of his poem, now became the central stem of the epic; and the properly and strictly personal element, which had been primary, became no more than accessory. But events are made for man, and not man for events; and we can scarcely doubt that the transition from the older epic, which gathered all its interests around the human soul as a centre, to the newer, which exhibits the human soul itself in a subordinate relation to external history or fortune, has been a transition downwards. It may be said, that Achilles is not the subject of the Iliad, in the same sense as Ulysses of the Odyssey. It is at any rate true that the action of the Odyssey is more directly related to the hero, than that of the Iliad. And so precise is the working of Homer’s intellect in all that appertains to poetical consistency, that a distinction of shade, just proportioned to this difference, is perhaps perceptible in the very _exordia_ of the two poems, μῆνιν ἄειδε Θεὰ, and ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον. The one seems to propose the Wrath of the Man: the other the Man himself. But substantially the proposition is questionable: Achilles is in effect, as truly as Ulysses, the life and strength, the chief glory and beauty, of his own poem.

It might perhaps be doubted, whether even the Liberation of Jerusalem was a finer subject for Christendom, than the siege of Troy for the Greek race. For it is a mistake to suppose that because the Redemption of mankind infinitely transcends all other transactions, the poetry which is composed about it will therefore be excellent in proportion. But at any rate this is not the question. Homer’s subject is, indeed, the Titanic passion of Achilles, and to this subject every Book of the Iliad, some of them positively and some negatively, but every one of them effectively, contributes; but is the Liberation of Jerusalem the true subject of the poem of Tasso?

~_Subject of the Gerusalemme more doubtful._~

The three first Cantos, with the ninth, the eleventh, and the nineteenth, are the only ones, which are in strictness occupied with the proper theme of the Jerusalem. The fifth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, and large portions at the least of the other eleven, are taken from the Siege, and are given to the truancy, or erratic and separate adventures, of those who ought to have carried it on; mainly of the two principal Christian warriors, Rinaldo and Tancredi. In short, near a moiety of the work is occupied, not with the Liberation of Jerusalem at all, but with the events which draw away the champions pledged to it, upon errands of a character the most incongruous with the grand design.

Will it be answered, that in the same manner Achilles disappears from the eye of the spectator during one moiety of the Iliad? The apparent parallel is wholly false. For the subject of the Iliad is the passion of Achilles; and the whole movement of the poem in his absence bears directly upon the enhancement and elevation of that subject. It exhibits to us the successive efforts of the Greeks, and of their most redoubted chieftains, one by one, to make up for the seclusion of Achilles from the fighting host. It was impossible for Homer more effectually to magnify his hero, than by recounting fully these exploits and their failure. In showing the perils and calamities brought about by his absence, they deeply impress us with the grandeur and efficacy of his presence, and prepare us for the reappearance of something more than man: of something which, but for a most skilful preparatory mechanism, we should probably have repelled as an unnatural exaggeration. But the love-born vagaries of the warriors of Tasso are mere impediments to the conquest of Jerusalem, and have no effect whatever in enhancing the poetical greatness of the achievement which was to crown the work, while they seriously deduct from the power and effectiveness, already in the case of Rinaldo but moderate, of the characters assigned to the warriors themselves.

It may therefore be true, as Mr. Hallam has said, that the events in Tasso spring naturally one from another; but so may a series of successive turnings off the line of a road we have been travelling, when taken singly, produce no serious, and even no sensible, deviation; yet their effect, when taken together, may be wholly to change our direction, and prevent us from making any way at all towards our point. Without doubt, each incident of an epic poem ought to follow naturally in the train of that which directly precedes it; but it is far more important that it should bear a legitimate relation to the central design, and should magnify, not detract from, the grandeur of that on which the whole fabric principally depends.

But there are surely many other objections to the mode, which Tasso has adopted, of impeding and retarding the accomplishment of his main action. Considering the nature of his theme, and the solemnity of the sanctions under which the Crusades were undertaken, although we have no right to ask that passion and infirmity should be banished from the camp, yet the wholesale entanglement of the very first warriors in love affairs, their rushing in a mass, with few exceptions besides greyheads of the camp, upon the track of Armida, their compelling Godfrey to allow the interests of this treacherous beauty to interrupt the august purpose of their undertaking, and then the very large proportion of the poem occupied in unravelling the web thus tangled, form, to my view at least, a bad poetical mixture of the intrusive with the Christian elements of the design.

Nor let it here be said, that even so our great Achilles stays the progress of the Greeks towards triumph for the love of a weak woman. We need not dwell on such distinctions as that Briseis was a noble and worthy, but Armida an unworthy object of attachment; that Achilles was but one, while Tasso touches all, who by age were capable, with the same phrensy. It is not even this worthy attachment alone, that acts upon Achilles: that is not the main stress of the tempest which so rends the strong heaving oak when he cries,

ἀλλά μοι οἰδάνεται κραδίη χόλῳ, ὁππότ’ ἐκείνων
μνήσομαι, ὥς μ’ ἀσύφηλον ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἔρεξεν
Ἀτρείδης, ὡσεί τιν’ ἀτίμητον μετανάστην[960].

[960] Il. ix. 646.

In Achilles, baffled love is surmounted by the image of agonizing pride, pierced through and through; and high over this again towers his hatred of the meanness of Agamemnon, and his sense of Justice, stung to the very inmost quick. Even supposing the question to be open, whether Homer has mixed his ingredients in due or in undue proportions, at all events there is no essential conflict among them. But such a conflict becomes visible and glaring, when a scope is assigned to the impulses and sway of personal passion upon an army devoted to God and to the highest aim, such as it is quite impossible to exemplify, nay to suppose, in any army that has ever been banded together for any even of the meaner ends of earthly policy.

Again, although Tasso’s poem is eminently Christian in its general intention, who does not feel that, instead of gathering our main sympathies and interest by means of his accessory circumstances round his principal subject, he has too effectually severed them from it, and has left it so bare and naked, that his liberation of Jerusalem is after all very like a common capture and sack; very like what, _mutatis mutandis_, the capture of it by the Saracens must have been? We leave him with our minds full of Tancredi and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Gildippe and Odoardo; but the associations, which these names suggest, connect themselves with any subject, rather than with the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre; and the respected Godfrey, with his plans, has, at most points of the poem, little more share in our thoughts than the Jupiter of the Iliad, as he feasts remotely grand on Olympus, or sits on Ida for the convenience of a nearer view.

~_Relative places of Rinaldo and Tancredi._~

Besides these objections of irrelevant interpolation, incongruous mixture, and divided interests, it may be observed that the relative prominence of the heroes of Tasso is not clearly pronounced. No one can doubt as to the question, who is the first, and by far the first, figure of the Iliad. Achilles ever haunts us, either in recollection or by sight; at any rate, he stands among and above his brother chieftains, as Saul out-topped by head and shoulders the people of Israel. But it is not easy to say who is the hero or protagonist of the Jerusalem. Although the interest which he attracts is inferior, yet the virtues, intellect, and moral force of Godfrey stand high and clear beyond those of all the other more prominent personages: he bears himself so meekly in his high office, and yet so perfectly and so exclusively exhibits the political spirit, that by mere moral and official greatness he stands, in any general view of the poem, an inconvenient neighbour and a dangerous rival to the two other figures, for one of whom the title of hero must have been designed. Taking, next, the yet more serious question between Tancredi and Rinaldo, which of this pair is intended to command the chief interest? Apparently, in Tasso’s intention, it is Rinaldo; because without him the main action stops, with him it proceeds. And yet the poet has assigned to Tancredi the deadly single combat with, and the triumph so powerfully described over, Argante, the only really great and terrible champion on the Mahometan side. How would the Iliad stand, if Diomed had killed Hector, and had left to Achilles only Æneas or Sarpedon?

Tasso here seems himself to have felt an incongruity, and to have sought to compensate Rinaldo in quantity for the (comparatively) deficient quality of his conquests. In the final assault he slays a multitude of the enemy like sheep[961]; when, as the poet says, in a manner surely far beneath his theme, the taste of victory had excited in him the appetite of carnage[962].

[961] Gerus. xx. 55.

[962] Ibid. 54.

Nor is it only in the distribution of military glory, that Rinaldo appears to have suffered for the advantage of Tancred. On one occasion indeed, immediately after the death of Gernando, Tasso has degraded Tancred for the advantage of Rinaldo. For the poet makes this warrior plead, that the offence of Rinaldo should be considered according to the quality of him who committed it, and that there can be no such thing as true justice without respect of persons:

Or ti sovvegna
Saggio signor, chi sia Rinaldo, e quale;
... non dee chi regna
Nel castigo con tutti esser uguale.
Vario è l’ istesso error ne’ gradi vari;
E sol l’ egualità giusta è co’ pari[963].

[963] Gerus. v. 36.

It was acting on an opinion of this kind, in the case of the Master of Stair after the Massacre of Glencoe, that left uneffaced a deep stain on the memory of William III. and of Scotland. Doubtless there have been periods when, even in Christian countries, such sentiments have been professed as well as practised; but can there have been any period when the utterance of them from the mouth of a knight, who is exhibited to us as a pattern, would not have caused a revulsion in the minds of ordinary hearers or readers?

~_The Woman-characters of Tasso._~

The Jerusalem is greatly overstocked with interesting couples; so much so, that at times we almost seem to be reading a Pastoral poem. Taken singly, the details of these love-stories are worked up with infinite art and beauty, and are the most effective and successful portions of the whole Epic; but the aggregate is so much too large, that it chills the general tone, as well as weakens the broader effects. The excess of quantity is, indeed, gross and glaring. Tasso has followed the Christian Romancers in employing largely the idea of the woman-warrior, practically unknown to Homer, introduced with great spirit but no very elevated moral effect in Virgil, carried by Bojardo and Ariosto to its perfection; and, without doubt, a conception far more suitable to the standard of those great poets of fancy, than to the lofty level of the Epic or the higher drama, which deal with the greatest powers and the deepest problems of our nature. Still, as to the manner of employing it, we need not deny that high praise must be accorded to the Clorinda of Tasso. It is indeed easy to criticize the religious incidents of her death, and not easy to understand what business she has after death in a tree of the enchanted wood; or why, when that wood becomes the prey of the carpenters, she is so unceremoniously overlooked in her uncomfortable abode. But as to the main exhibition of the character, she follows Bradamante without degeneracy: pure, upright, chivalrous, thoroughly martial, and yet not grossly masculine. She falls to the lot of Tancred. But besides the Sofronia, the Erminia, and the Gildippe, in the second degree of prominence, there is projected on the picture another person yet more conspicuous than even Clorinda, namely, Armida; so different that they can hardly be compared, and yet inconveniently jarring from the similarity of their relations to the great heroes of the poem. Both, too, are lovely; both figure in the camp. Notwithstanding, however, the profusion of charms, which Tasso has called into existence to set off the person and the powers of Armida, nothing can be more unsatisfactory than her character itself, except its place in the poem, and her particular relation to Rinaldo. When every one else is ravished by her overpowering attractions, he remains insensible: and yet afterwards, with no poetical justification for the change, he becomes desperately enamoured of her. Here we see that feebleness in the conception and exhibition of character, which depresses the flight of Tasso, which excludes him from a place in the class, quite as open to poets as to philosophers, the class of the greatest masters of thought and of human nature.

~_The Armida of Tasso._~

We become acquainted with Armida, the beautiful enchantress, first in the guise of a forlorn damsel, who implores succour from the Christian heroes; and this is perhaps the most successful portion of the _rôle_ assigned to her. Then she appears as the Circe of her own gardens: then she is a Dido without an Æneas, for the escape of Rinaldo from the disgraceful servitude into which she had inveigled him bears no resemblance to the fond and deep passion of the Carthaginian queen, which grew out of an honourable hospitality afforded to the Trojans in distress. With a disagreeable amount of likeness in detail, the copy still misses the original, and loses all that force and majesty of intense passion to which here, and here alone, Virgil has been enabled to ascend. Then instead of that tragic end of Dido, in which, though with an attitude somewhat theatrical, softness and fierceness are so wonderfully blended, so that she does not forfeit sympathy even in her keenest longings for revenge, Armida has recourse to an expedient which is wholly debased and vulgar. She simply offers herself for sale, promising to be the prize of any warrior of the Egyptian camp, who shall execute her vengeance on Rinaldo for the offence of having escaped out of her toils.

Nor have we yet done with the doublings of her tortuous path. She sees Rinaldo pass her in the battle; and, not without infinite doubting, shoots an arrow at him. It is perhaps difficult to define in language what it is, that constitutes the difference between the mental struggles of genuine passion, and mere incongruous vacillation. We see the former in Dido; and one sign of it is a certain progression. Where the law of nature is followed, perpetual fluctuation is not allowed; by degrees, though they may be slow and many, the mind is worked up to a strong resolve, where it abides: its agitation and seeming reflux is but the receding wave of the advancing tide; and when once a strong purpose is full-formed after struggle in a truly powerful nature, whether of man or woman, it must not be changed. Now this is what we miss in Armida. She is ever playing at backwards and forwards. Thrice she draws the bow, thrice she relaxes it: at last she discharges the arrow, but with it a wish that it may miss:

Lo stral volò; ma con lo strale un voto
Subito uscì, che vada il colpo a voto[964].

[964] Gerus. xx. 63.

Not unnaturally, this unsatisfactory passage leads us to one of the worst of all the provoking conceits that disfigure from time to time the beautiful pages of this poem:

Tanto poteva in lei, benchè perdente,
(Or che potria vittorioso?) amore[965].

[965] Ib. 64.

Yet, after all this, revenge again gets the upper hand, and her eye follows the arrow with avidity, hoping it may strike. She then repeats the shot again and again, and while doing it is again herself shot in return by love:

E mentre ella saetta, Amor lei piaga[966].

[966] Ib. 65.

Again the same alternation is reiterated; but her champions fail. She flies. She resumes the part of Dido; apostrophizes her own weapons in a speech of near thirty lines, entreating them to despatch her. Rinaldo then arrests her arm; and yet once more, in stanzas replete with beauty of diction, we have the same unsatisfactory and indecisive mixture of ill-assorted emotions, without the strength either of harmony or of contrast, founded on no natural law, connected by no moral or mental tie, ordered to no end or consummation. However, he vows himself her adorer, and she gives herself up to his disposal:

Ecco l’ ancella tua; d’ essa a tuo senno
Dispon, gli disse; e le fia legge il cenno[967].

[967] Ib. 136.

And so we leave them. But unhappily we cannot, in leaving them, forget that she is a Mahometan and a sorceress; that her frauds have been the great scandal of the army, and the main obstacle to the completion of its design; that she has never throughout the whole poem exhibited a single quality containing in it the elements of just moral attraction; and that this triumph of mere corporeal form, without one solitary note of inward loveliness, is achieved over the greatest of the warriors of Christ, when engaged, under the immediate and special direction of the Almighty, in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from infidel dominion. With all these circumstances before us, it must be admitted that a more lame and unsatisfactory contribution to the climax of a great Christian poem could hardly have been contrived. Nor is the impression much amended by the dedication of the eight last stanzas of the work to the completion of the victory by Godfrey. A reader may, on the contrary, well feel perturbed by the sharpness of the transition, and by the air of unconsciousness with which, in gathering up the threads of the action, Tasso has brought into close neighbourhood matters so heterogeneous, that they form a kind of moral chaos. And the observation applies to the close of the poem, which may well have accompanied it throughout its course; that the sympathies of the reader are not evoked and managed with due, or with any, reference to the greatness and nobleness of the objects, but, on the contrary, are allured into the wrong quarter. Homer has carefully contrived, in the case of Paris, that even his extraordinary personal attractions shall do nothing to give him a hold upon our favour, while he has given his warmest sympathies to the beauty of the innocent, though comparatively insignificant, Euphorbus[968]. How tame and flat, on the contrary, has Tasso made the stainless Erminia, whom indeed he altogether forgets before the poem closes; and what efforts of art has he not used to gather admiring interest around the character and fate of the heartless, even when enamoured, Armida. Nay, more, with some brilliant exceptions, especially that noble one of the first view of Jerusalem, how cold and slack, how uninteresting to the reader, is the movement of the main action of the poem, compared with that of the love-stories which invade and engross so inordinate a portion of the ground. We seem to feel that, after all, the Siege of Jerusalem is not the principal business in hand; it is the task which must somehow or other be got through, but it is not the life and pulse, the light and joy of the poem. As the Siege of Troy was the instrument of Homer, to enable him to develop his Achilles, so the much higher subject of the Crusade is the tool of Tasso to enable him to exhibit his workmanship, chiefly in connection with love-stories, upon very inferior persons and performances. The relative values of the setting and the jewel are totally different in the two cases.

[968] Il. xvii. 51.

~_The affront of Gernando._~

Besides the first great hindrance to the prosecution of the siege in the seductive power of Armida when she appears in the camp, there is a second, namely, the slaughter of Gernando by Rinaldo, upon a personal affront. It has here been objected to the first, that the effect assigned to it is out of proportion to all example and to all likelihood, though it may be suitable to the passionate susceptibilities of Tasso’s individual mind; and that this disproportion jars peculiarly from the more than usual elevation of the subject. Is the second obstacle more happily conceived?

Rinaldo, in the Fifth Canto, unlike his companions, has proved impregnable to the assaults of Armida’s mingled beauty and art:

Ma perch’ a lui colpi d’ amor più lenti
Non hanno il petto oltra la scorza inciso,
Nè molto impaziente è di rivale,
Nè la donzella di seguir gli cale[969].

[969] Gerus. v. 12.

He rather aspires to succeed to the fallen Dudone in the immediate command of the forces. Yet even with respect to this, his ambition purports to be under the guidance of high principle:

I gradi primi
Più meritar che conseguir desio[970].

[970] Ibid. 151.

Presently the Norwegian Prince Gernando, moved by jealousy, insults him; on which Rinaldo there and then gives him the lie, and slays him.

It is hardly possible to measure the inferiority of this combination, as respects poetic art and effect, to the scene of the First Book of the Iliad, with which it must naturally be compared: where Achilles is stung, and stung at once in every fibre of his deep, proud, and impassioned nature, by the mingled meanness and tyranny of Agamemnon. The affront in Homer is so contrived that it shall contain all the highest elements of provocation: avarice, tyranny, injustice, ingratitude, on the one side are made to exacerbate the wounds inflicted by public degradation, and by the sudden loss of a beloved object, on the other. But the insult of Gernando to Rinaldo is an every-day insult of the streets: yet an American duellist could not have been more summary in his proceedings, than is the great Christian champion. The brutal provocation instantly breaks down both the piety and the moral firmness of Rinaldo. It is not so with Achilles. In him there is a conscious force of self-command, which absolutely, though not relatively to his passion, is even beyond that of other men; and though unequal, indeed, yet is all but not unequal to controlling that tempestuous flood of wrath. Nothing can be grander than the picture of this his first great mental convulsion. We must quote the lines:

ὣς φάτο· Πηλείωνι δ’ ἄχος γένετ’, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορ
στήθεσσιν λασίοισι διάνδιχα μερμήριξεν,
ἢ ὅγε φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ
τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὁ δ’ Ἀτρείδην ἐναρίζοι,
ἠὲ χόλον παύσειεν, ἐρητύσειέ τε θυμόν[971].

[971] Il. i. 188.

Then, while the strong current eddies to and fro within him, and while his fingers, playing instinctively on the handle of his sword, cause its blade to be seen, comes the warning vision of Pallas to him, and to him alone. This admonition restores the disturbed balance of his mind; and, his inward wound assuaged with the promise of a future revenge, to be wrought out for him by the self-condemning hands of the inflicters and abettors of the wrong, he moodily foregoes the reckoning of blood.

Such is the solid, the Cyclopian structure of the fabric, into which Homer has built his characters. Had the hero of Tasso indeed been endowed with a sublimity of passion beyond or like that of Achilles, we might not have been entitled to call him strictly to account for the slaughter of Gernando. But the truth is, that he is a somewhat jejune and feeble character; and his offence in this instance is not from the excess of the impelling, but from the defect, or rather the utter absence, of the restraining power.

Gioberti, in a posthumous work[972], remarks that the heroes of Paganism are more effective than those of Christianity, because the standard by which they are measured is lower, the idea imperfect instead of perfect. There is, I believe, much both of truth and of depth in this observation. It is no more than justice that Tasso should have the benefit of it, which is not inconsiderable.

[972] _La Riforma Cattolica_, lately published at Turin, with an excellent preface by Massari.

~_Differing modes of describing personages._~

Such, however, as his heroes are, he takes the precaution to describe them in outline at a very early stage indeed of his proceedings, namely, in the stanzas 8-10 of the First Canto. He here places before us Godfrey, Baldwin, Tancred, Boemondo, and Rinaldo; and he resumes from time to time the business of describing them. Bojardo and Ariosto avoid this; but it is probably because they were dealing with characters of well-known type, already familiar to their audience. Homer, who drew so much more powerfully, had more to describe than any of them. And yet it may be said he never describes characters at all, with the very slight exceptions of Nestor, in a few words, and Thersites with somewhat more detail: the latter, it is evident, because he wanted to concentrate contempt and disgust upon his qualities, for exhibiting which in action he could not afford to such a wretch any extended space: the former, perhaps because he has thought it better for effect to abstain from marking him through the poem by distinctive epithets, and could produce a certain roundness of figure, highly suitable to the personage, in this way with more convenience. But, in general, Homer’s characters are described by their actions only, with the aid of choice and characteristic epithets, and here and there of some small but pointed allusion, not from themselves nor from the Poet, but in the speeches of others. Thus he grapples with the full scale of the demands of the dramatic art. Others could not follow him. We must not blame Tasso for a proceeding quite necessary by way of clue to his poem; rather, indeed, we should praise the ingenious manner in which he has effected his purpose, by a survey which the Almighty takes of the Christian camp; a proceeding alike conducive to the religious character of his poem, not always so well cared for, and to the supply of the first necessities of his readers.

In the details of his battles, Tasso is a great and skilful describer. Perhaps in this point alone, out of so many, he may be termed superior to Homer. At least we may be disposed to think he has nothing so unsatisfactory under this head as the death of Patroclus. It may be another question how far he is indebted for instruction in this department to his great countrymen, especially Ariosto, and also whether he has anywhere equalled the magnificent account of that terrible contest with Rodomonte, which, in the Furioso, sums up Ruggiero’s triumphs.

As nearly all the greater situations and combinations of the Gerusalemme, and its general framework, have been suggested by the ancients, so the minor imitations are too numerous for notice. Many of Tasso’s similes are extremely beautiful and finished; and he has followed Homer in employing them to relieve the narrative of battle; but he has not observed the same judicious parsimony in other parts of his poem; he has apparently not perceived, certainly not followed, the general rules of Homer in the distribution of this ornament, and the result has been that they produce a somewhat cloying effect.

Like Virgil, he has been betrayed into imitating Homer in certain cases, where the whole reason of the case was changed: as, for instance, in the Invocation before the Catalogue, and in the wish expressed for multiplied organs of speech. To Homer, a reciting poet, the Catalogue was a great effort of memory, and it therefore justified the special application to the Muse: to Tasso it must have been one of the easier parts of his performance. As respects the second point, what can be more reasonable in the case of an unwritten composition? what less so, when the poet works with pen and ink? Nor is the case much mended by supposing that Tasso had in mind his recitations, unless the recitation had been, not the accident, but the rule, so that the poem would itself, in the ordinary course of thought, be conceived of as associated with the act of reciting.

Tasso seems, however, to have fallen into a more serious error in introducing a Second Catalogue into his poem. The first may be defended by the same reasoning, which so amply warrants that of Homer. But what interest could Christendom or Italy feel in the detailed muster-roll of the Egyptian army?

~_The Return of Rinaldo._~

If in the Jerusalem the Wrath is beneath the standard of the Iliad, so is the Return. On the side of Rinaldo, indeed, it is most just and right, that he should be extricated from the entanglements of the seductive Armida: but, on the side of Godfrey, there is the same sorry management of all the moral elements of the case. In Homer, Achilles was justly and most deeply offended: on every principle known to the creed of Paganism, or to Greek life and experience, he justly resented the offence: the utmost that can be imputed to him is a decided excess in the indulgence of a thoroughly righteous feeling: and this was terribly expiated by the bloody death of that friend, who was to him as a second self. But the gross offence of Agamemnon is dealt with according to the most righteous rules; and he is compelled by word and gift to appease the man whom he had robbed, insulted, and striven to degrade. While he is brought both to restitution and to apology, how different is the arrangement of Tasso’s poem! Rinaldo was wronged by Gernando: but Godfrey had done no more than his duty: he was the minister of public justice, of lawful authority, and of military discipline: in respect to him, and likewise in respect to the army, Rinaldo was the offender, Godfrey and public right were only the sufferers; yet Godfrey and public right give way under the pressure of adversity, and the offender comes back in a kind of triumph.

If it has been found possible in the case of Virgil to institute a more minute comparison with Homer, this cannot be attempted in the case of Tasso, for his work hardly admits of juxta-positions in detail. We have already noticed the abundant stock of real analogies between the subject of the Trojan expedition, and that of the Crusades. Tasso himself, in his anxiety to follow Homer, even added to them, by feigning a centralization of the Christian enterprise, which I fear did not really exist. But to imitate is one thing, to be like is another; and it still remains hard really to compare the poems, far harder the poets. In order to see this clearly, let us ascend a height, and view the scene which lies before us. How vast a deluge of time and of events has swept away the very world in which Homer lived, and the worlds that succeeded his: the place of nativity is changed, the great gulf of time is stretched between, the language is another, the religion new, all the chains of association have been taken to pieces and re-forged, all the old chords of feeling are now mute, and others that give forth a different music are strung in their stead. And there is also, it must be confessed, a great and sharp descent from the stature of Homer, as a creative poet, to that of Tasso. Yet he too is a classic of Italy, and a classic of the world; and if for a moment we feel it a disparagement to his country that she suffers in this one comparison, let her soothe her ruffled recollection by the consciousness, that though Tasso has not become a rival to Homer, yet he shares this failure with every epic writer of every land. On the other hand, no modern poet, dealing with similar subject-matter, has been equal to Tasso. None has erected, upon similar foundations to his, a fabric so lofty and so durable, so rich in beauty and in grace: so well entitled, if not to vie with the very greatest achievement of the ages that went before him, at least to challenge or to win the admiration of those generations that have succeeded. But his defeat is, after all, his greatest victory. To lose the match against Homer is a higher prize than to win it from his other competitors. Few indeed are the sons of genius, and elect among the elect, who can be brought into comparison with that sire and king of verse; and Tasso, we are persuaded, would bear against none a grudge for thus far, in his own words, limiting his honours:

e ciò fia sommo onore;
Questi già con Gernando in gara venne[973].

[973] Ger. v. 20.

SECTION VI.

_Some principal Homeric characters in Troy._

_Hector: Helen: Paris._

To one only among the countless millions of human beings has it been given to draw characters, by the strength of his own individual hand, in lines of such force and vigour, that they have become, from his day to our own, the common inheritance of civilized man. That one is Homer. Ever since his time, besides finding his way into the usually impenetrable East, he has provided literary capital and available stock in trade for reciters and hearers, for authors and readers of all times and of all places within the limits of the Western world;

Adjice Mæoniden, a quo, ceu fonte perenni,
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.

Like the sun, which furnishes with its light the close courts and alleys of London, while himself unseen by their inhabitants, Homer has supplied with the illumination of his ideas millions of minds that were never brought into direct contact with his works, and even millions more, that have hardly been aware of his existence. As the full flow of his genius has opened itself out into ten thousand irrigating channels by successive subdivision, there can be no cause for wonder, if some of them have not preserved the pellucid clearness of the stream. Like blood from the great artery of the heart of man, as it returns through innumerable veins, it is gradually darkened in its flow. The very universality of the tradition has multiplied the causes of corruption. That which, as to documents, is a guarantee, because their errors correct one another, as to ideas is a new source of danger, because every thing depends upon constant reference to the finer touches of an original, which has escaped from view. And this universality is his alone. An Englishman may pardonably think that his great rival in the portraiture of character is Shakespeare--a Briton may even go further, and challenge, on behalf of Sir Walter Scott, a place in this princely choir, second to no other person but these. Yet the fame of Hamlet, Othello, Lady Macbeth, or Falstaff, and much more that of Varney, or Ravenswood, or Caleb Balderston, or Meg Merrilies, has not yet come, and may never come, to be a world-wide fame. On the other hand, that distinction has long been inalienably secured to every character of the first class, who appears in the Homeric poems. He has conferred upon them a deathless inheritance.

But, through waywardness and infirmity, mankind corrupts that with which it sympathizes, and undermines what it obeys. The same law of waste and decomposition, which from day to day corrodes the works of nature, operates also in divers manners and degrees upon the creations of mind. As the portraitures of individual character, to be found in the works of the great masters of the imaginative faculty, are among the very highest of these creations, so, because they are the greatest, they are the most difficult to render into other forms, and to transfuse through new media. Among the ancient sculptures it is easier to find a good Faun than a good Venus, while again those works, which embody the very highest ideals, are not only rare, but are in most instances unique. In like manner the Punch and the Harlequin, the broad characters of primitive spectacle and farce, readily become national, and are transmitted, spontaneously as it were, through ages without substantial change; but the finer and nobler representations of man, requiring greater effort, and a different order of mind to comprehend, as well as to project them, rapidly degenerate in the very points on which their peculiar excellence depends.

Other causes, besides mental impotence in the recipient, contribute towards this result. One main agent is, the inability or the disinclination of mankind to go back to originals. For the mass, a modernizing process is commonly in demand, is readily furnished, and is itself again and again varied from age to age. It is always easier to derive from what is itself derivative, than to go up to the fountain-head. Into the business of every profession, including (now more than ever) that of letters, necessity drives her adamantine clamps: and the βάναυσον and the φορτικὸν, or slang and the clap-trap, maintain a too successful struggle to depress its higher and more genial aims.

~_Causes of injury to Homeric characters._~

It is not difficult to point out reasons why the characters of Homer should have been peculiarly exposed to injury from the lapse of time. Most of all from two causes; because they were of such extraordinary and refined merit, and because of the form in which they were conveyed. Not only did they bear the stamp that the highest genius alone could affix, but nothing less than care, sympathy, and manly effort, could enable men to comprehend them. For they were not exhibited in the set forms of descriptive passages, which might be learnt by rote, but they were wrought out in the fine, as well as deep and strong lines of life and action; and none of them could be defined in terms, until they had first been profoundly felt within. We were to become acquainted with them as friends, by living with them through their varied fortunes; not as strangers, by some letter of introduction, that sets forth their birth, parentage, calling, and qualifications. For earnest and hearty attention they provided the richest possible reward; by the careless they were to be enjoyed indeed, but scarcely to be apprehended. To the eyes of such men there is little or nothing to discriminate, as between Agamemnon, Ajax, Diomed, Menelaus, and Patroclus; and if Nestor is a good deal older, Ulysses a good deal more cunning, and Achilles even more valiant than the rest, a single touch disposes of these differences, and enables us to reduce all the eight nearly to a common type. A prior examination of particular instances will best prepare us for weighing the force of those other causes, besides the weakness of human nature, and the excellence of the works in the general sense of the words, that contributed to depress and deface the Homeric characters.

In the present Section, then, I propose to invite attention to a few Homeric characters, as they stand in the poems, which, as far as I am able to judge, stand in need as yet of further elucidation.

Perhaps there is no one particular in which Colonel Mure has rendered such important service to the modern Homeridæ, as in his account of the Homeric characters. In general, I shall best discharge my duty by simply referring the reader to his pages. I venture, however, to think, that while the paramount subject of the great Grecian characters is incomparably handled by him throughout, some exception may be taken to his representation of a part of the Trojan personages; of Hector, for example, and more particularly (if she may be placed in this class) of Helen. At least, I presume to regard some of them as fairly capable of being presented in another light, and I shall proceed at once to make the attempt with Hector.

~_Relation of Orlando to Hector._~

I. ‘In the character of this hero,’ says Mure, ‘good and evil are so curiously blended that it is hard to say which element predominates[974].’ Is there not a different view of the composition of qualities, which Mure has thus placed in equipoise?

[974] Character of Hector, Lit. Greece, vol. i. p. 347.

It is indeed eminently true, as in the same place he proceeds to observe, that in order to maintain what may be called the conventional balance, or stage-equality, which was necessary in order to give interest to his poem, Homer has magnified the prowess of Hector, in general terms, as of the highest transcendental order: but that in actual achievement he is greatly surpassed by the leading Greek heroes. Indeed, in many places of the Iliad it even seems questionable, whether Hector is a hero at all.

How successful Homer’s art has been in thus paying off the Trojan champion with generalities, while he nevertheless reserved the true palm of military virtue to his own countrymen, we may, perhaps, best judge from considering the effect which the picture has had upon the poets of Italy, and upon European opinion at large, in more recent times. With the former, the name of Hector seems to be the prime type of the heroic character. Thus Tasso celebrates--

‘Il buon Foresto, dell’ Italia Ettorre[975].’

[975] Ger. xvii. 69.

And further. Beyond the Alps, Orlando was the prime warrior or protagonist, as well as the finest character, of the mediæval romance, until it was modified by Ariosto, whose courtly object it was to elevate Ruggiero above him. But with the poets who followed Ariosto, Ruggiero seems to have been put by as an interpolation, and Orlando to have resumed his paramount place. Now the character of Orlando is plainly modelled upon the traditional idea of Hector, with the Christian element attached to and pervading it. That Hector was thus chosen, in preference to Achilles or any Greek hero, may be owing, among other causes, to these. First, that the Roman poets, Virgil especially, had taught Italians to look to Troy as the cradle of their grandeur. Secondly, that the character of Hector, from the large infusion into it of moral and of passive ingredients, was better fitted for coalescing with the Christian ideas. And thirdly, that, as the part assigned to Italian patriotism in the middle ages was commonly defensive, in this point also Hector offered a more appropriate model. There is more, however, to observe; for it may be thought that, among the Trojans, Æneas would have offered a better groundwork for Italian poets. But here we may remark how the genuine and masculine birth outlives the spurious. The natural Hector of Homer thrust aside the pale and sickly automaton of the Æneid, even in Italy, its adopted country. The latter was so artificial and effete, that it would not even bear copying: the former had a foundation in truth, upon which the structure of exaggeration could be reared. Thus Hector became, after two thousand years, the central power of a new and splendid literature.

But when we turn back to the verse of Homer, and put together the evidence in the case piece by piece, surprise is excited by the contrast between the pretensions of Hector, having its basis in general descriptions and in the later tradition, on the one side, and on the other the actual performances, in the Iliad itself, of the Trojan champion. First, there is Achilles, his known superior; of whom, as a warrior, he comes within no measurable distance. But besides this, he suffers virtual defeat at the hands, once of Diomed, and twice of Ajax; glaringly as to the former, and not doubtfully as to the latter: for though the first battle is interrupted, and is taken for a drawn one, yet Ajax has had the best of it at every point, and, while the Trojans are too happy upon the mere escape of his opponent without bodily harm, Homer carries him to the tent of Agamemnon rejoicing in his victory (κεχαρηότα νίκῃ[976]). It is yet more worthy of note, that Hector is never permitted in actual fight to overcome any one considerable Greek. In the case of Patroclus, the Poet has even laid this fact much too barely open; for he makes Hector little, if anything, more than the mere executioner of death upon an unarmed man. Menelaus, who stood in what we may call the third rank of Grecian heroes, is indeed, on one occasion, withdrawn from conflict with him, as being too greatly inferior to risk the fight; but the conflict for the body of Patroclus[977] is so contrived as to show even this prince holding the field with success in despite of the Trojan chief; and, during the absence of Achilles and Patroclus from the contest, no less than nine other Greek warriors offer themselves to meet him in single combat[978].

[976] Il. vii. 312.

[977] Ibid. 109.

[978] Ibid. 161.

The greatest exploit of Hector, in the whole Iliad, is the bursting open of the gates of the Greek rampart[979]. But if we compare this with the feat of Sarpedon, who had just before opened a breach by tearing down the battlement[980], we must give a decided preference to the Lycian hero; for he performs his achievement in the teeth of Ajax and Teucer, who are on the spot; while there is not a single Greek commander present when Hector breaks through the gates. The comparative feebleness of Hector’s military character is, however, most pointedly shown in the Eleventh Book, when Jupiter determines to give effect to the decision that honour shall be done to him[981]. In the first place, he receives a friendly warning to keep out of the way as long as Agamemnon remains on the field. He accordingly enters the battle only when Agamemnon has retired; but he is forthwith driven out of it by Diomed[982]. When he again returns to it, the Greeks under Machaon baffle all his efforts, until that very secondary chieftain has been disabled by an arrow from the bow of Paris[983]. And according to all human appearances, the Trojans must have been defeated and shut up in the city by the Greeks even without Achilles, such was the superiority of Achæan arms, had not Homer called in the inferior agency of stones and arrows to wound three of the four chief remaining Grecian warriors, namely Diomed, Agamemnon, and Ulysses; besides Eurypylus and Machaon[984].

[979] Il. xii. 445-71.

[980] Ib. 392-407.

[981] Il. xi. 186-90.

[982] Il. xi. 349-67.

[983] Ib. 502-7.

[984] Ib. 660.

The only occasion when Hector comes out as a really great and gallant warrior is that one when he is certain to be, and is accordingly, worsted by the overpowering might and divine arms of Achilles. For here Homer could safely give him ample scope without endangering or obscuring the fame of that hero, to whom, with art never surpassed, he has given an immeasurable, but yet not a forced or unnatural, preeminence.

~_Hector second-rate as a hero._~