HOR/E HELLENICX.*
THESE Essays possess admirable qualities, that upon the theology of Homer and one or two others being masterly, and not one of the eleven valueless, whether in respect of stimulating thought or conveying information. Professor Blackie has some virtues so strongly developed that they tend to a vicious excess. He is courageous, frank, and sincere ; somewhat too combative, some- what too peremptory. He is. not cautious as to overstepping his peculiar province, and lays down the law with amplest assump- tion of authority, without invariably inquiring whether his know- ledge is on a level with his vehemence. Of devout, unper- plexed and joyful nature, he is inspired with strong faith in the Divine constitution of the universe, and resents as blas- phemy all doubt that supreme benevolence rules the world.. We not only respect Professor Blackie's robust faith, but believe him to be essentially in the right. He repels as am insult to heart and brain the idea of a mindless universe. But peremptory assertion of his faith is no rational defence of it, and sincere indignation against atheists is no adequate substitute for acquaintance with their arguments. "A reason- able world," he says, " can never be conceived as the possible result of an unreasonable cause. If the maunder- ing of a mad-house were to go on to all eternity, it could_ never stumble into the demonstration of a single proposition in. Euclid." The atheist will, of course, reply that everything: which ought to be proved in these sentences is taken for granted, and will ask in what sense the universe, with its apparent waste of blazing suns, its internecine war among all known creatures capable of pain, its tortures inflicted upon the noblest forms of animal life (man and the mammalia) by the ignoblest (parasitic- zoophytes and fungi) can be shown to be reasonable. Of the doctrine of atoms, propounded or guessed at by Democritus, Professor Blackie gives this account :—" The doctrine of atoms: which be originated has, no doubt, a certain philosophical value,. though assuredly not a very profound one ; for it is easy to see that all composite masses can be broken down, dissipated, and, resolved into certain infinitesimally small atoms or molecules,. which must be regarded as their ultimate elements." No one could' dismiss in this off-hand manner the magnificent guess of Democrif- tus, if he were acquaintedwith the light thrown upon it by the recent- discoveries of chemists, particularly of Dalton. Having demon- strated the existence of a Divine Being from the reasonableness of: the world, Professor Blackie does not scruple, in particular in- stances, to demonstrate the rationality of the constitution of things from the Divine existence. Greek accentuation must, he tells us, be based upon rational principles, because there is a. God :— "The significant utterance of articulate breath, like every other- manifestation of reason-moulded sense, is a part of assthetical science,. and subject to the same necessary laws which determine the excellence• of a picture, a poem, or a piece of music. No doubt in the enunciation of words, as in all the fine arts, fashion may often prevail to such an extent as, in some cases, to usurp the place of reason and propriety;; but the prevalence of false taste in any department of art does not affect the eternal principles by which it is regulated, any more than the- prevalence of murders or lien amongst any people can take away from the essential superiority of love to hatred, and of truth to falsehood, in all societies of reasonable beings. We are, therefore, justly entitled to. look for a standard of excellence in the matter of orthoepy, no less: certain than the standard of truth in morals and mathematics, as, indeed, all things in the world, being either directly or indirectly the- necessary effluence of the Divine reason, must, in their first roots ands foundations, be equally rational and equally necessary."
Who would have expected to come, in an essay published in 1874„ upon a teleological theory of the Greek accents ? Practically,. however, Professor Blackie's doctrine is the safe and comfortable one that common-sense is always divine.
The essay on the Theology of Homer occupies sixty pages, and! is, in fact, a careful treatise upon the subject. Whatever- exception may be taken to Professor Blackie's opinions, it must be admitted that he does not spare himself or beat his learn- ing thin in laying it before his reader. There are in this, essay ample materials for a small volume on Homeric theology,. and we are not sure that Professor Blackie would not have done more justice to himself, and reached a larger circle of readers, if he had expanded it into two or three hundred pages. Homer-
• Homo Hellenicm: Essays and Discussions on S01114 Important Points of Chmek Philology
and Antiquities. By J. 8. Blackle, &c. London : Macmillan and Co. 1874. was essentially popular, and it is easy to interest all intelligent people in him and the brave old time he represents. Professor Blackie, thoroughly familiar with the Iliad and the Odyssey, has brought together the passages in both poems that have any direct or important bearing on religion, and drawn conclusions from them which he classifies under nineteen propositions. In the large majority of instances he quotes the Greek ; in a few he contents himself with reference. We have tested his accuracy here and there, and have not once found it at fault. But he is too free from pedantry, and his reputation as a Greek scholar is too well established, to have rendered it necessary or wise in him to deface his English page with so much Greek. We can imagine no reason why Professor Blackie should not address as wide a circle in these essays as Grote and Gibbon in their histories. The dreariest blockhead may become learned by sheer drudgery, and load his page with untranslated passages, but no blockhead will do what the great authors named have done, and what Professor Blackie is capable of doing,—namely, transfuse into clear, picturesque, well-modu- lated English every Greek passage which is required to illustrate the text. Our remarks, however, bear exclusively upon the sym- metry and the popularity of this dissertation, viewed as an English essay. As addressed to mere scholars, it is, we repeat, masterly. This does not imply that it leaves nothing to be done, but only that what is done in it is of great value. Alter considering all that Professor Blackie teaches on Homeric theology, we are inclined to press him for replies to one or two questions. What, we would ask, was the strictly-estimated contribution made in the Homeric poems to the religious belief or ethical code of mankind ? lie will perhaps answer that he has furnished the materials for forming this estimate, and that we have no right to ask for more. But he uses-certain large expressions which he must be supposed to apply to those materials, and our perplexity is how to suit the one to the other. He says that Homer " asserts the fundamental, moral, and re- ligious instincts of human nature ;" but as we scan his quotations, we have the greatest difficulty in specifying the religious or moral principles which they enjoin. At a critical point, Professor Blackie's evidence is much less strong than could be desired. It would be a most important fact, if ample proof of it were forth- coming, that Homer's Zeus "is in an especial manner the friend and protector of those who have none to help them, and the enforcer of all the great rights and duties by which the frame- work of society is knit together. He is the rewarder of those who do well, and the punisher of those who do evil." In a few passages—and they are the most genial glimpses of primitive manners afforded in the Homeric poems—Zeus is referred to by Telemachus and others as caring for the stranger and the poor, and it was the regular thing to invoke his sanction to an oath. But we have no proof that Zeus was expected " to visit with retribution unrighteous deeds of whatsoever description," and we have proof without measure that such expectation would have been vain. For it is certain that Zeus and his whole sanhedrim were an unprincipled, scampish lot. If one of them ever did good, it must have been when there was no conceivable inducement to do evil. Professor Blackie, who is perfectly honest in the statement of facts, supplies so much evidence of this, that it is not without astonishment we read his generous ascription of moral qualities to Zeus. He admits that the Homeric Greeks looked upon their gods as suggesting evil to men's minds quite as naturally as good. Helen threw the blame of her unfaithfulness on Aphrodite ; Agamemnon accused Zeus and other deities of having put wicked anger into his heart ; and the apology was not only tendered in good faith, but was manifestly regarded as valid by those who heard it. The gods were " capa- ble of acting falsely, and of deceiving the expectations which they had raised in the breasts of mortals." Professor Mackie gives so many illustrations of the truth of these words, that he cannot maintain the falsehood and deceit to have been exceptional to the general practice of the gods. Without any notion that he is blaspheming, one Homeric warrior says, " 0 father Zeus, how superlatively fond you are of lying !" Even the beat of the Olympians, the pattern of respectability and prim virtue, was an accomplished and audacious liar :— " Athena, the incarnated wisdom of 'the father '—one of the most perfect characters in Hellenic theology—on two distinct occasions per- petrates a very gross act of deceit and falsehood, from which every honourable and manly feeling revolts ; in thefirbi place, she solicits and obtains from Zeus, (the Opus, the Avenger of violated truth !) the per- mission to tempt Pendants to violate the treaty solemnly sworn to by the leaders of the Trojans and the Greeks, which treaty is accordingly broken, and the daughter of Zeus is guilty of tempting a mortal man to committ an act of pure perjury, her father consenting (Ii. iv). In the second place (what Hermann, in his Latin argument, calls an 'elves doles'), by personating Deiphobus (11. xxii. 227), she draws away the unsuspecting Hector into that unequal conflict with the son of Peleus in which he was to meet his sad fate."
It seems incredible that, having arrived at this point, the advocate of Zeus and the other Olympians did not throw up his brief. Professor Blackie, however, argues with in- trepid ingenuity that it was on behalf of the Greeks that Athena was so immoral, that the general lesson of the Odyssey is the majesty of retributive justice, and that the Hebrew Scriptures exhibit the Deity in questionable positions. We answer that we cannot see how the moral instincts of the race are attested by lying and treachery, even though these happen to be exercised on behalf of Greeks ; that the outrageous over-doing of his vengeance by Ulysses, his inhuman murder of the female slaves, and the infernal cruelty of his dealing with Melanthius, have always seemed to us to render the con- summation of the Odyssey a ghastly parody of justice ; and that no help can be had in the case from the Hebrew Scriptures. " In the Old Testament we read that 'God hardened Pharaoh's heart,' and that 'the Lord sent a lying prophet' to a certain Hebrew king." True ; and the contrast presented by these statements to the New-Testament expositions of divine morality proves that in the Hebrew Scriptures we have but the stammering accents in which the moral education of the world began. But whatever may be the blemishes of Old-Testament morality, the contrast between that and the morality of the Homeric gods is incomparably more glaring than the contrast between the words of Moses and the words of Christ. The moral code of the Mosaic religion is the Decalogue, which continues to this hour, for practical purposes, the most admirable summary of personal, domestic, social, and religious duty in existence, and of which it is simply monstrous to imagine the Olympians to have produced three sentences. The representations which the writers of the Jewish Scriptures have given of Jehovah are not immaculate, but when we think of the Zeus of the Iliad, we find it impossible oven to form a comparison between the two. On the whole, there- fore, we conclude that, though this essay contains a comprehensive and accurate account of the mythological personages and doc- trines of the Homeric poems, Professor Blackie does not make out, and it is not possible to make out, that either the Homeric gods or their worshippers had ideas consistent enough to be scientifically formulated on the subject of truthfulness, justice, compassion, disinterestedness, or any virtue except, perhaps, courage, patriotism, and hospitality. Moral ideas were beginning to glimmer upon the minds of the Homeric Greeks, but they had attained no. clearness, and had not been discriminated either from each other or from the related vices. Murder, for example, was not realised as in itself wrong. You could cut the throat of your slave without a pang of conscience, but you knew it was not right to kill a father, a brother, or a fellow-clansman. A lie was meritorious, or the reverse, according to circumstances ; if clever, and told for the purpose of rescuing oneself or one's comrades, it was heroic. Rapine and cruelty struck no one as impious. Strictly speaking, there is hardly such a thing as a Homeric theology, and there certainly is no such conception in Homer as that of a just, benefiCent, and holy God. In all this we regard ourselves less as dissenting from Professor Blackie than as stating with some additional precision his fundamental view of the subject. It is only to his inferences that we take the slightest exception ; his statement of facts is luminous, comprehensive, and fair. In this, and in all the essays, the style is clear, nervous, animated, and occasionally eloquent.
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