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JUNE 5, 1858.

BOOKS.

GLADSTONE ON HOMER.* MANY of those who take up this book will be far more interested about the author than about his subject. That a man so immersed in practical life as Mr. Gladstone, so laborious and vigilant a poli- tician, and one so familiar with the excitements which a place in the first rank of living statesmen must supply, should have thought it worth his while and have found time to write these three volumes on Homer, naturally excites our curiosity ; and we feel some de- sire to see whether the writer explains in any degree the politician, —whether any light is thrown upon Mr. Gladstone's parlia- mentary course of action by his speculations about antiquity. There is one quality which might have been easily brought into question by a literary effort of this kind, but for which we believe Mr. Gladstone's readers will be more reluctant than before to refuse him credit ; that is, earnestness in whatever he under- takes. If this book had been written as an intellectual feat, to challenge admiration for versatility of talent, or even as a re- creation for hours of leisure or fatigue, the work itself would pro- bably have been worthless, and we should have been justified in suspecting the author of going through a performance, or amusing himself, on other occasions ; but there is not the least sign of affec- tation about the book. It is evident that the writer's heart is in his work ; it is entirely clear of egotism, a manly and serious labour, and it even has decided practical aims. We can easily believe that doubts may still be entertained as to the trustiness of Mr. Gladstone's judgment in estimating the comparative impor- tance of things, and that he may seem too impetuous and too readily mastered by a view which enlists his sympathies, and excites his ingenuity, to be relied upon as a consistent leader ; but his integrity and candour, together with his ardent love of all that is worthy and noble, will commend themselves strongly, we feel assured, to all who look into this remarkable book. It is obviously a great gain to literature and scholarship that a man in Mr. Gladstone's line of life should devote himself with such delight to a scholar's subject. We are not thinking now of the support thus given to the pretensions of classical studies ; Mr. Gladstone's vindication of Homer is something very different from Lord Wellesley's Latin verses. The benefit we mean consists in the freshness and life which a practical acquaintance with affairs must infuse into-the consideration of ancient poetry and history. Mr. Gladstone wishes Homer to be more largely studied in our higher education ; and'we confess that he has persuaded us that far more may be learnt from Homer than has been commonly gathered hitherto by the school or college reading of him. But in order to be thus profitable, he must be read in connexion with the real interests of our own time. We need not forget that we are Englishmen of the nineteenth century, in reading the KX‘a dAprum of the old Homeric age. If we can recognize living men and women in the Achilles and Ulysses, the Andromache and Nausicaa, of the Homeric poems, the costume, at once so simple and'so dignified, in which their age presents them to us, will in- crease both the instructiveness and the fascination of a familiar acquaintance with them. There is such a power in the actual life of men and women, especially when the life has been at all noble and energetic, to command our respect and sympathies,— there is so much more significance in it, for all that Mr. Buckle may teach, than in the mere accumulation of knowledge,—that we may get to understand our own religion and our own politics better by studying men as they believed and as they acted in the most remote and dissimilar times, than by reading the most con- summate discourses on either branch of our civilization.

Mr. Gladstone tells us that he is actuated by some such con- viction in inviting those who are or will be thoughtful and pa- triotic English citizens to an open-eyed study of the Iliad and Odyssey. He pleads in this eloquent strain.

"This Greek mind, which thus became one of the main factors of the civilized life of Christendom, cannot be fully comprehended without the study of Homer, and is nowhere so vividly or so sincerely exhibited as in his works. He has a world of his own, into which, upon his strong wing, he carries us. There we find ourselves amidst a system of ideas, feelings, and actions, different from what are to be found anywhere else ; and forming a new and distinct standard of humanity. Many among them seem as if they were then shortly about to be buried under a mass of ruins, in order that they might subsequently reappear, bright and fresh for application, among later generations of men. Others of them almost carry us back to the early morning of our race, the hours of its greater simplicity and purity, and more free intercourse with God. In much that this Homeric world ex- hibits, 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 heathen- ism, 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, how is it possible to over-value this primitive representation of the human rase in a form complete, distinct, and separate, with its own religion, ethics, policy, history, arta, manners, fresh and true to the standard of its nature, Sipe 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."

215Tudies on HOW"' and the Homeric Age. By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, E•I %L. M.P. for the University of Oxford. In three volumes. Oxford: at the university Press.

[MONTHLY SUPPLEMENT.]

There is a story that, in the Augustan age of French literature, a Frenchman was boasting to an Englishman of the superior ex- cellence of the writers of his country, compared with those of England, and that the Englishman retorted by saying, There are only two subjects worth writing about, Religion and Politics ; and on these you dare not open your mouths. Mr. Gladstone shows his English instincts by dwelling with most emphasis and full- ness upon the Homeric Religion and Politics ; and our readers will be glad that we should devote most of our space to his views on these subjects.

His second volume is entitled " Olympus," and is devoted to an inquiry into the religion of the omeric :kge. The actions of men are so mixed up with the actions of gods in the poems, that for the understanding of Homer as well as of his age, it is neces- sary to consider what Mr. Gladstone calls the Theo-mytho- logy of the time. Whatever amount of fiction the poet was con- scious of introducing into his accounts of the immortal gods, Mr. Gladstone justly. claims a right to assume that the gods them- selves, with their mutual relations and their functions, were not a mere poetical machinery, but belonged to the actual belief of the heroic age. In estimating the influence of the prevailing creed upon the lives of men, Mr. Gladstone is obliged to confess that the moral character of the Olympian gods was not at all cal- culated to improve through imitation the character of their wor- shippers. He finds scarcely any but selfish and unworthy mo- tives ascribed even to the better natures amongst the gods, so that in fact the men of the poems are morally superior to the gods. But at the same time he sees traces of truer conceptions a divine character, and he works out an elaborate theory con- cerning the mixture of the true and the false in the Homeric my- thology, which may be briefly described as follows : There are two distinct elements in the Homeric system of gods, one derived from authentic primitive tradition, the other from the inventive tendencies of men. The revelation made to the patriarchs of the Mosaic books may be supposed to have spread widely amongst the Asiatic races, and to have descended to the heroic age, though becoming gradually fainter and more overlaid with inventions. To this primitive revelation all true and reverent ideas in. the Homeric religion are to be ascribed ; and when these are sub- tracted, all that remains is to be set down to human invention. Scriptural theology and vulgar or poetic mythology make up to- gether the Olympian Heaven.

In attempting to resolve the Homeric creed into its two consti- tuents, Mr. Gladstone might be said to be mainly guided by the obvious principle of assigning all that he approves to tradition, and all that he disapproves to invention. His analysis, though rather diffuse, is most animated and interesting. But there are two objections to this genesis of the Homeric Olympus, attaching to each factor respectively.

(1.) Too much stress is laid upon Tradition, which owes its ex- istence entirely to hypothesis in Mr. Gladstone's inquiry. He himself condemns " the far-fetched and extravagant supposition," that Homer had learnt the elements of religious truth from the contemporary Hebrews, or from the Law of Moses. But will it not also seem to most of his readers, " far-fetched and extrava- gant " to " suppose " that Homer learnt them instead, through intervening generations from Noah ? Mr. Gladstone does not profess to exhibit any historical basis for this theory, and if we give to Tradition the sense which common usage as- signs to it, and which Mr. Gladstone appears to adopt, it may fairly be argued that " ideas," such as we find embodied in the heroic religion, are not transmitted from one memory to another ; that what Mr. Gladstone disentangles from mythological forms are not forms of Tradition, but the truer thoughts figured by the mythology ; and that definite "traditions " trickling down from Noah to Homer must have lost all their positive character and value before they could be so chemically combined with the inven- tions of men.

(2.) Moreover the division which Mr. Gladstone is compelled to make, by adopting Tradition and Invention as his two factors, is arbitrary and unsatisfactory. He finds the great Scriptural ideas concerning the nature of God partially recognized in the func- tions of certain prominent Olympian gods, most of all in Apollo and Athene, or Minerva, subordinately. in Artemis, or Diana, and Leto, or Latona, and some inferior divinities. (We must protest, in passing, against Mr. Gladstone's undue conservatism in retain- ing the Latin names of the Olympian gods. Such an inquiry as that which he has undertaken is of itself a greater innovation upon the scholarship of the last century than the adoption of the true Greek names ; and it makes the needless confusion introduced by the Latin associations of the Latin names quite intolerable. Thanks to Mr. Kingsley, the English reading public, including very youthful readers, will soon know as much about Zeus, and Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, and Hephaestus, as about Jupiter, and Juno, Venus, Mars, and Vulcan. We wonder also that Mr. Gladstone could bring himself to speak of the gods of tradition and invention as " traditive " and " inventive " gods. It would be an improvement in these 'volumes if such blemishes in nomencla- ture could be removed. But this by the way.) The special signs noted in the divinities of invention are local charactenatics,

unworthy attributes, and pausly fanciful conceptions. Guided by these marks, Mr. Gladstone sets aside all the Olympian gods, with the exception of those named above, as having a purely my- thological origin, or as bearing " traditive " features in a se- condary and inconsiderable degree. But we believe this question of degree is of more importance than our author assumes. If we compare Apollo and Zeus, for example, the received account of Apollo may perhaps show more of the true idea of God than that of Zeus does, but we conceive it to be quite possible to maintain on the other side, that the fatherly character ascribed to Zeus was a more important witness to men of what God is, than the attributes of Light and of Deliverance connected with Apollo. Mr. Gladstone admits that Zeus, the father of gods and men, was in Homer "a kind of synonym of Providence," but objects that "his name seems to be used as a mere formula," and that Homer did not believe in the real activity of such a Providence. So much the more reason, we should say, for classing Zeus as a " traditive" rather than as an " inventive " deity. Why again should there not be some vestiges of Tradition in Demeter or Themis, even in Ares and Hephtestus, although the acts and dispositions assigned to these gods be in the highest degree un- worthy of the true witness which they may bear ?

Mr. Gladstone is contending against the theory that all the thee- mythology of the heroic age was of mere human invention and of equal authority. Where he sees the human fancy openly at work, he finds its products unworthy or ridiculous. So far as his fa- vourite Homer, for example, " feigns " about the Gods, Mr. Glad- stone agrees with Plato in regarding the fictions as lowering the divine character. But is there not another alternative besides this theory and Mr. Gladstone's hypothesis of a lingering tradi- tion ? We might as easily suppose the true God to be directly teaching the fathers of the heroic age, as believe that he had taught the patriarchs of Mesopotamia or Syria, and had left with them the deposit of a tradition which was to ooze away as it spread. St. Paul in speaking to the Athenians of the Creator and Ruler whom they ignorantly worshipped, says nothing about tra- dition : he says that this God, whose offspring they were, had been leading the nations to seek after their Lord, if haplythey might feel after him and find him, though he was not far from every one of them. If we adopt St. Paul's view, we shall be prepared to find signs and witnesses of.the living God in all the belief of men, not because a faint tradition of Him had reached them before it died out, but because He was near them all, and they were feeling after Him. In that case, we shall have the same criterion for our diagnosis of all mythologies that Mr. Gladstone chiefly relies upon, but we shall use it more extensively and more confidently. We shall at once ascribe to Divine teaching all that is true, or that witnesses to the truth, and shall refer the rest to the interference of human fancy or passion. But we shall not think it necessary to exclude anything from the former category, simply because it has the marks of human feeling or fancy operating upon it, be- cause we shall assume that the working of God as a revealer is upon the conscience and the reason of men. Happily, however, Mr. Gladstone's admirable review of the Homeric religion is not rendered valueless by what we conceive to be his mistake in sub- stituting tradition for immediate Divine teaching. His analysis serves the purpose of the view we have suggested as much as of his own, and as it enables us to study the religion of the heroic age apart from the late mixtures with which it is generally asso- ciated, it brings out with unusual clearness the lessons which may be learnt from it.

We must let Mr. Gladstone express in his own words his en- thusiasm for the " politics " of Homer. " Nothing in those poems," he says, " offers itself, to me at least, as more remark- able, than the deep carving of the political characters; and what is still more, the intense political spirit which pervades them. I will venture one step farther, and say that, of all the countries of the civilized world, there is no one of which the inhabitants ought to find that spirit so intelligible and accessible as the English ; because it is a spirit that still largely lives and breathes in our own institutions, and, if I mistake not, even in the peculiarities of those institutions. There we find the great cardinal ideas, which lie at the very foundation of all enlightened government ; and there we find, too, the men formed under the influence of such ideas ; as one among ourselves, who has drunk into their spirit, tells us-

' Sagacious, men of iron, watchful, firm,

Against surprise and sudden panic proof.' "

Mr. Grote has argued that we do not find in Homer the strong " constitutional " convictions which existed in.the Greek states of the historic ages. But this Mr. Gladstone denies. He says that " along with an outline of sovereignty and public institutions highly patriarchal, we find the full, constant, and effective use of two great instruments of government, since and still so exten- sively in abeyance amongst mankind ; namely publicity and per- suasion." He wishes to concentrate marked attention tmon these two features of heroic government. It is the oratory of the Ho- meric poems which, more than anything else in them, excites the admiration of our brilliant Parliamentary debater ; and he fairly argues that the continual exercise of popular oratory by the Ho- meric chiefs implies that substantial deference to public opinion, for the sake of which representative and constitutional forms have been created. He shows what an important place is occupied by the "Assembly" in Homeric life, and how naturally the poet -conceived of an assembly as being animated by a common soul. • " Of this common soul," he adds, " the wpm, Homer is the Th or ' Somebody ; by no means one of the least remarkable, though though he has been one of the least regarded personages of the poems. The Tis of Homer is, I apprehend, what in England We now call public opinion. We constantly find occasions, poet wants to tell us what was the prevailing sentiment among the Greeks of the army. He might have done this didacticall and described at length the importance of popular opinion, 44 its bearings in each case. He has adopted a method more poetical and less obtrusive. He proceeds dramatically, through the me- dium of a person and of a formula- ' aesE si TLS EllrECSKSV, Milli ES Air laX0V2 " " It is remarkable," says Mr. Gladstone in another place, "that there is no Tie in Troy." He discerns in Troy less of the spirit of freedom, more deference to authority, apart from rational persuasion, than amongst the Hellenic peoples ; and we suspect that this is the main reason why Mr. Gladstone's sympathies are so decidedly with the Greeks against the Trojans. Most readers of the Iliad find themselves gradually siding more and more with the Trojans, whilst they cannot help disliking Achilles and Ulysses, and Diomed, and almost all the Greek champions. But Mr. Gladstone is true to the countrymen of his poet, and no hero was ever more admired than Achilles is by him. He sees in Achilles the common elements of human nature "raised to a scale of magnificence which almost transcends our powers of vision." Our author's language respecting the hero is adapted to that scale, and we confess that he makes us smile sometimes by its extravagance. We must give one instance of a kind of exagge- ration which points to the absence of a strong sense of humour amongst Mr. Gladstone's many tine qualities. Achilles makes a great speech, for which his admirer would evidently have forgiven him almost any shortcomings—" such a combination of argument, declamation, invective, and sarcasm, as, written in the same com- pass, I do not believe all the records Of the world can match." In this speech, (Iliad, B. ix.,) Achilles rejects the appeal of the Envoys sent to beg. him to fight once more in the Grecian ranks, and declares his intention of going home immediately. The Envoys may come the next day and see him depart, " if they think it worth while." Otirsat, if/0910-0a, Ka at Kiv 'roc .ra fugal. This sarcasm Mr. Gladstone loads with eulogy. He says that Achilles " with the razor edge of the most refined irony cuts his way in a moment to the quick." He selects this one passage out of all Homer to render into verse, and gives it in spirited Mar- mion " metre. Then in another part of the book he refers again to this same " withering sarcasm," and ascribes to it " a bitter- ness that mounts far away into te region of the sublime." With the exception, however, of this exaggeration in degree, Mr. Gladstone's estimates of character seem to us very fresh and true; and we are especially pleased with his gentle and considerate appreciation of Helen. It is far better that a commentator should think of Greece as if it was modern England, and of Troy as if it was modern France, than that the external differences of cos- tume and cultivation should make him forget Greeks or Trojans to be men.

With all his vehemence, too, Mr. Gladstone, we are bound to say, never forgets to be candid and rational. He is liable to the bias of a partisan and a Conservative, but he is courteous and reasonable towards those who differ from him. He is willing to allow very considerable defects even in Homer, and two of his concluding chapters expose the wonderful looseness as to number and colour which characterizes a mind so intelligent and in many points so exact. It is very singular that there is no discrimina- tion of the simplest and most obvious colours in Homer. Captain Yule mentions, in his account of Burmah, that Indians in general cannot in the least take in the representation of form,—that a learned pundit, seeing a picture of a ship, will ask if it represents London. Homer will apply the same term of colour to blood and to a storm-cloud, to oxen and to the sea. This confusion as to colour goes along with a peculiarly vivid apprehension, as Mr. Gladstone shows, of lightness and darkness, and also of living movement.

We have no space for remarks on the Ethnological and Geo- graphical speculations of these volumes. Mr. Gladstone not only knows his Homer better than perhaps any one else has ever known him, but he has also read and studied the best literature of his subject. Probably he is over hasty and too easily persuaded in these cooler matters, as well as those which are more personal, but this is a failing that leans to virtue's side, and is very soon reme- died by other critics. On the whole it is almost superfluous to say that there are ampler materials for the illustration of Homer, and for the discovery of his true value, in these volumes than in the whole mass of preceding commentaries, not even excepting the admirable work of Mr. Mare. Upon what is called the Homeric question —the doubts, namely, that have been raised as to Homer's personality and the integritY of the two poems which bear his name —Mr. Gladstone does not enter. He considers the question settled in the conservative sense, and refers with entire confidence to the conclusions of Mr. Kure in this field of inquiry. But we might reasonably adduce the work before us as one of the •strongest possible arguments against Wolf and his followers, and ask, is it possible that what we have been thus examining as the coherent production of a great genius is after all only a string df promiscuous ballads. We may fairly complain that such .scaptuasm would make too strong a demand upon our credulity.