We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no relief, no softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of the Odyssey. All is stern enough and terrible enough there; more terrible, if possible, because more distinct, than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall.
But there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make against what we have been saying. It is not delight in slaughter, but it is the stern justice of revenge which we have here; not, as in the Iliad, hero meeting hero, but the long crime receiving at last its Divine punishment; the breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has been slowly and awfully gathering.
With Homer"s treatment of a battle-field, and as ill.u.s.trating the conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from two modern poets--one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies, in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.
The first is from the "Albigenses" of young Lenau, who has since died lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such thoughts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at Toulouse, and the poet"s imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the scene. "The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all silent, dead,--the last sob spent,"--the priest"s thanksgiving for the Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the "vultures crying their Te Deum laudamus."
Hat Gott der Herr den Korperstoff erschaffen, Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein boser Geist, Daruber stritten sie mit allen Waffen Und werden von den Vogeln nun gespeist, Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen, Die Korper da sich la.s.sen wohl behagen.
"Was it G.o.d the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit gorging merrily over their carrion, _without asking from whence it came_."
In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death--death has no terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed, or at least pa.s.sed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul, whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted--doubly revolted, one would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds through Shakespeare"s "Sonnets," through "Hamlet," through "Faust;" all the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few lines; the sense of wasted n.o.bleness--n.o.bleness spending its energies upon what time seems to be p.r.o.nouncing no better than a dream--at any rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say, Truth is a lie; faith is folly; eat, drink, and die,--then his picture would have been revolting; but the n.o.ble spirit remains, though it is borne down and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is not revolting, but tragic.
Far different from this--as far inferior in tone to Lenau"s lines, as it exceeds them in beauty of workmanship--is the well-known picture of the scene under the wall in the Siege of Corinth:--
He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall Hold o"er the dead their carnival; Gorging and growling o"er carca.s.s and limb; They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar"s skull they had stripp"d the flesh, As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh; And their white tusks crunch"d o"er the whiter skull, As it slipp"d through their jaws when their edge grew dull, As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead, When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed; So well had they broken a lingering fast With those who had fallen for that night"s repast.
And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll"d on the sand, The foremost of these were the best of his band:
The scalps were in the wild dog"s maw, The hair was tangled round his jaw.
Close by the sh.o.r.e, on the edge of the gulf, There sate a vulture flapping a wolf, Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away, Scared by the dogs, from the human prey; But he seized on his share of a steed that lay, Pick"d by the birds, on the sands of the bay.
For a parallel to the horribleness of this wonderfully painted scene we need not go to the Nibelungen, for we shall find nothing like it there: we must go back to the carved slabs which adorned the banquet halls of the a.s.syrian kings, where the foul birds hover over the stricken fields, and trail from their talons the entrails of the slain.
And for what purpose does Byron introduce these frightful images? Was it in contrast to the exquisite moonlight scene which tempts the renegade out of his tent? Was it to bring his mind into a fit condition to be worked upon by the vision of Francesca? It does but mar and untune the softening influences of nature, which might have been rendered more powerful, perhaps, by some slight touch to remind him of his past day"s work, but are blotted out and paralysed by such a ma.s.s of horrors.
To go back to Homer.
We must omit for the present any notice of the domestic pictures, of which there are so many, in the palaces of Ulysses, of Nestor, or of Alcinous; of the games, so manly, yet, in point of refinement, so superior even to those of our own middle ages; of the supreme good of life as the Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they endeavoured to realise that good. It is useless to notice such things briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. But the impression which we gather from them is the same which we have gathered all along--that if the proper aim of all human culture be to combine, in the highest measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of refinement and of manliness, then Homer"s age was cultivated to a degree the like of which the earth has not witnessed since. There was more refinement under Pericles, as there is more in modern London and Paris; but there was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times of feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere human sense, apart from any other aspect of the world which is involved in Christianity, it is difficult to point to a time when life in general was happier, and the character of man set in a more n.o.ble form. If we have drawn the picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. The shadow was there, doubtless, though we see it only in a few dark spots. The Margites would have supplied the rest, but the Margites, unhappily for us, is lost. Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer to the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The grand is always more or less ideal, and the elevation of a moment is sublimed into the spirit of a life. Comedy, therefore, is essential for the representing of men; and there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Agamemnon"s greatness was discoloured, like Prince Henry"s, by remembering, when he was weary, that poor creature--small beer--_i.e._ if the Greeks had got any.
A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged to say that we find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint which even he is obliged to cast over the position of women. In the Iliad, where there is no sign of male slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and though there does not seem to have been any practice of polygamy, the female prisoners fell, as a matter of course, into a more degraded position. It is painful, too, to observe that their own feelings followed the practice of the times, and that they composed themselves to bear without reluctance whatever their destiny forced upon them. When Priam ventured into the Grecian camp for Hector"s body, and stood under the roof of Achilles, he endured to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever yet endured--to give his hand to his son"s destroyer. Briseis, whose bed was made desolate by the hand of the same Achilles, finds it her one greatest consolation, that the conqueror stoops to choose her to share his own. And when Hector in his last sad parting scene antic.i.p.ates a like fate for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony of horror with which such a possible future would be regarded by a modern husband; nor does Andromache, however bitterly she feels the danger, protest, as a modern wife would do, that there was no fear for her--that death by sorrow"s hand, or by her own, would preserve her to rejoin him.
Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, conclusively fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years"
elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace, entertaining her husband"s guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not afraid even in Menelaus"s presence to allude to the past--in strong terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this respect the Homeric Greeks were better than their contemporaries in Palestine; and on the whole there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity when women held a higher place, or the relation between wife and husband was of a more free and honourable kind.
For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there is no doubt that Penelope is Homer"s heroine in the Odyssey. One design, at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter.
Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a divine [Greek: aoidos], a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her pa.s.sion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty weary years, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again.
The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses.
It is Ulysses"s first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we have scarcely added.
For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The s.e.xes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room, settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials.
Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache worked roses in very modern cross-st.i.tch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay, who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions as "drinking the blood of the slain," might discover, perhaps, a similar unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies, wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and only covered with a girdle of leaves--standing still to meet him when the other girls ran away t.i.ttering and terrified, is the perfect conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them, Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of intercourse between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt in the way which he has described.
Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of writing (at any rate for a poet"s purpose) was unknown to him. There is a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer, about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century B.C.
We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals, until writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer"s own land--Alcaeus, for instance--should have left such a work to be done by a foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us, therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are the work of the same is yet _sub judice_. The Greeks believed they were; and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style, yet not greater than the resemblances in the "Two n.o.ble Kinsmen" and in the "Yorkshire Tragedy" to "Macbeth" and "Hamlet;" and there are more remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have tried their hand in their own language with the disputed plays of Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every way; and we shall best conclude our own subject by noting down briefly the most striking points of variation of which as yet no explanation has been attempted. We have already noticed several: the non-appearance of male slavery in the Iliad which is common in the Odyssey; the notion of a future state; and perhaps a fuller cultivation in the female character. Andromache is as delicate as Nausicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope; and in marked contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the pa.s.sage where the grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is compared to the grief of a young wife flinging herself on the yet warm body of her husband, and looking forward to her impending slavery with feelings of horror and repulsion. But these are among the slightest points in which the two poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves in the Odyssey, but there are [Greek: Thetes], or serfs, an order with which we are familiar in later times, but which again are not in the Iliad. In the Odyssey the Trojans are called [Greek: epibetores hippon], which must mean _riders_.
In the Iliad, horses are never ridden; they are always in harness.
Wherever in the Odyssey the Trojan war is alluded to (and it is very often), in no one case is the allusion to anything which is mentioned in the Iliad. We hear of the wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of Achilles, the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for his arms. It might be said that the poet wished to supply afterwards indirectly what he had left in the Iliad untold; but again, this is impossible, for a very curious reason. The Iliad opens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused such bitter woe to the Achaians. In the Odyssey it is still the wrath of Achilles; but singularly _not with Agamemnon, but with Ulysses_. Ulysses to the author of the Odyssey was a far grander person at _Troy_ than he appears in the Iliad. In the latter poem he is great, but far from one of the greatest; in the other, he is evidently the next to Achilles; and it seems almost certain that whoever wrote the Odyssey was working from some other legend of the war. There were a thousand versions of it. The tale of Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative position of the heroes was doubtless changed according to the sympathies or the patriotism of the singer. The character of Ulysses is much stronger in the Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him--his soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence--they are held in very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father"s courage, and then to add--
[Greek: alla ton huion geinato heio cherea mache, agore de t" ameino.]
But the Phoeacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool. "The G.o.ds,"
Ulysses says, "do not give all good things to all men, and often a man is made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favour they fling, like a garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people delight to _look_ on him. He speaks with modest dignity, and he shines among the mult.i.tude.
As he walks through the city, men gaze on him as on a G.o.d."
Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. The very slightest external evidence would weigh them all down together. Perhaps the following may be of more importance:--
In both poems there are "questionings of destiny," as the modern phrase goes. The thing which we call human life is looked in the face--this little chequered island of lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean of darkness; and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the last words of Ecclesiastes, "Fear G.o.d, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." But the world bears a different aspect, and the answer looks different in its application. In the Iliad, in spite of the gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for anything beyond--nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men, the G.o.ds, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the moral mysteries of our being hang like a mist over us from the beginning to the end; and the cloud from time to time descends on the actors, and envelopes them with a preternatural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression of "suffering being the lot of mortals," as if it had been abused already for unG.o.dly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the G.o.ds, when they themselves, in spite of all the G.o.ds can do to save them, persist in their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pa.s.s from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals, those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor divine--at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus, or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there is a strangeness even in the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many Circes, and Sirens, and "Isles of Error" in our path. In the same spirit death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.
But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose.
What are those Phoeacian ships meant for, which required neither sail nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried, and bore them wherever they would go?--or the wild end of the ship which carried Ulysses home?--or that terrible piece of second sight in the Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?--or those islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into being to complete the number?--or those mystical sheep and oxen, which knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?--or Helen singing round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief"s heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear wife far away beyond the sea?
In the far gates of the Loestrygones, "where such a narrow rim of night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving home his flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture," we have, perhaps, some tale of a Phoenician mariner, who had wandered into the North Seas, and seen "the Norway sun set into sunrise." But what shall we say to that Syrian isle, "where disease is not, nor hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?" There is nothing in the Iliad like any of these stories.
Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the poems. Each is so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the differences which we seem to see arise from Homer"s own choice of the material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[X] _Fraser"s Magazine_, 1851.
[Y] Mackay"s _Progress of the Intellect_.
THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.
1850.
If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals--as men who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanct.i.ty, but who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection; the editors chose only out of the ma.s.s before them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.
Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say little in this place. The "Lives" have no form or beauty to give them attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank.
And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pa.s.s for anything in the estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.
Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of natural history or of metaphysical speculation, and we do not laugh at them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief.
Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew, and they could not grow; they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human inst.i.tutions as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead when their power to hurt us has pa.s.sed away; and as Paganism can never more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer att.i.tude towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediaeval mythology what it has done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find there also at least as deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a moral element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the saints are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty, they are always good.
And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on the magnitude of the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides.
They took only what was in Latin--while every country in Europe had its own home growth in its own language--and thus many of the most characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their collection. And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in all cases late, and compiled out of the ma.s.s of various shorter lives which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary character, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know how they came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says _must_ have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick, appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about which there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in some way or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read; that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth, wherever the Catholic faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and remembrance of G.o.d, there dwelt the memory of some apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for his Master"s sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the angels of G.o.d were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the faith pa.s.sed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to grow. Those who had once known the Apostles, who had drawn from their lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather together what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumours blew in from all the winds. They had been seen here, had been seen there, in the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering, prevailing. Affection did not stay to scrutinise. When some member of a family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, or on some dangerous expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story of his end can be collected but fitfully from strangers, who only knew his name, but had heard him n.o.bly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at; reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to love strong grounds of confidence, and "trifles light as air" establish themselves as certainties. So, in those first Christian communities, travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome, and seen Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him, from the wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown to its full size in a single night, making merchandise of the precious relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow moral on the impostures and credulities of the early Catholics. An Atheist could not wish us to say more. If we can really believe that the Christian Church was made over in its very cradle to lies and to the father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which after such an admission we may profess to entertain. For, as this spirit began in the first age in which the Church began to have a history, so it continued so long as the Church as an integral body retained its vitality, and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded and which brought on the Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century; as the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever more and more great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long their histories, living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured, laid hold of them and filled them: and the devout imagination, possessed with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held sacred, pa.s.sionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only, not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.
From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolator, what a strange sight must be that still mountain-peak on the wild west Irish sh.o.r.e, where, for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and where, in the sharp crystals of the trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless the "Lives of the Saints" are full of lies. Are there none in the Iliad?
or in the legends of aeneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of Siegfried true? We say nothing of the lies in these; but why? Oh, it will be said, but they are fictions; they were never supposed to be true. But they _were_ supposed to be true, to the full as true as the "Legenda Aurea." Oh, then, they are poetry; and besides, they have nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to do with Christianity. Religion has grown such a solemn business with us, and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the fulness and freedom which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the recognised ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web which we call history: the one, the literal and external truths corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact; the other, the truths of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves either in distorted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new creation--sometimes moulding and shaping real history; sometimes taking the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes appearing as recognised fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We are stating a fact, not a theory; and if it makes truth and falsehood difficult to distinguish, that is nature"s fault, not ours. Fiction is only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction?
but when it is--to _law_. To try it by its correspondence to the real is pedantry. Imagination creates as nature creates, by the force which is in man, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions are facts, when we subst.i.tute truths of one kind for truths of another; when we subst.i.tute,--and again we must say when we _intentionally_ subst.i.tute:--whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on the imagination (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them they must and will do so), invention glides into the images which form in our minds; so it must be, and so it ever has been, from the first legends of a cosmogony to the written life of the great man who died last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot relate facts as they are; they must first pa.s.s through ourselves, and we are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of things: and therefore it may be said that the only literally true history possible is the history which mind has left of itself in all the changes through which it has pa.s.sed.
Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superst.i.tious as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of the trials and vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.
No rect.i.tude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other pa.s.sion. Love believes eagerly what it desires; it excuses or pa.s.ses lightly over blemishes, it dwells on what is beautiful; while dislike sees a tarnish on what is brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only truth can get received?--then let us contrast the portrait, for instance, of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester,[Z] at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impa.s.sive spirit. Man will never write it, until perfect knowledge and perfect faith in G.o.d shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.