Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

Upon the whole, this delineation of Helen in the Third Book may well be taken as one of the most masterly parts of the Iliad. The extreme fineness and delicacy of its shading mark it as an immortal work of genius, and the gentleness of Helen towards Priam, with her severity to herself, and her sternness both to the corrupter, and to the goddess that aided and inspired him, form a moral picture of the most striking truth and beauty. Indeed, if the question be asked, where does Paganism come nearest to the penitential tone and the profound self-abasement that belong to Christianity, we might find it difficult to point out an instance of approximation so striking as is, here and elsewhere, the Helen of Homer.

In Il. vi. Il. xxiv. Od. iv.

In three other places of the poems, Helen is put prominently forward.

In the Sixth Book, before Hector repairs to the field, he goes to the palace of Paris to summon him forth. He finds the effeminate prince handling uselessly his arms, while Helen is superintending the beautiful works of her women¹⁰³⁰. By and by it appears that, sensible of the shame of her husband’s cowardice, though without interest in his fame, she has been persuading him to go forth and fight; and she takes the opportunity of Hector’s presence to offer him a chair that he may rest from his fatigues; to revile herself as, next to her husband, the cause of them; and, while grieving that she had outlived her infancy, to lament also that, if she was to live at all, she had not been united to one less impervious to the sentiment of honour.

Again, Homer has thought her not unworthy of the third place, with Andromache and Hecuba, as mourners over the mighty Hector, in the deeply touching description of the return of his remains to Troy¹⁰³¹. The tenour of this speech is kept in the exactest harmony with what has gone before.

We now bid adieu to the Helen of Homer in her sorrow and shame among the Trojans. But the Poet presents her to us again in prosperity and domestic peace, as the Queen of Menelaus; who, though not the heir of the high throne of Agamemnon, yet held a station in Greece, after the Return, of highly elevated influence. This is a picture, which it would not have been in accordance with the usual course of Homer to set before us, had his mind attached to Helen the character given to her by the later tradition; for where does he represent to us the wicked in prosperity, without bringing down on them subsequently the vengeance of heaven? But on the Helen of the Odyssey he has left no note of sorrow, except the most moving and appropriate of all, namely this, that the gods gave her no child after Hermione, the daughter of her early youth¹⁰³².

From her stately chamber she comes forth into the hall, after the feast. She is attended by three maidens, who bear respectively the first her seat, the second its covering, the third her work-basket and distaff. She remarks on the likeness of Telemachus to Ulysses, and humbly recollects to confess, that she herself has been the cause of the sufferings of the Greeks. The allusions then made to Ulysses cause her, with the rest, to weep tenderly; and when her husband with his friends resumes the banquet, she infuses into their wine the soothing drug, supposed to have been opium, which she had obtained from Egypt, to make them forgetful of their sorrows. Then she begins to tell tales in honour of Ulysses: and how, when in his beggar’s dress he escaped scatheless from Troy, and left many of the Trojans slaughtered behind him, she alone, amidst the wailings of the women, was full of joy, for her heart had been yearning towards her home.

There is indeed a trait that deserves notice in the speech of Menelaus, which has been lately mentioned. Helen came down to detect, if possible, the Greeks concealed within the Horse: therefore, to act in the interest of the Trojans. Now if, on the one hand, she looked back on her country and her first husband with many yearnings, yet it was not to be wondered at that as a woman, nowhere pretending to the character of a heroine, she should be so far pliable to the wishes or subject to the compulsion of the Trojans – especially when we remember her love and reverence for their head, and for Hector, who had but lately died in their defence – as to make this effort to defeat the stratagem of the besiegers. But Menelaus, in referring to the incident, carefully spares Helen’s feelings by another of those strokes of exceeding tact and refinement for which Homer’s writings are so remarkable, both generally, and as to the chivalrous character of this hero in particular. ‘Thither,’ he says, that is to the Horse, ‘thou camest; and no doubt,’ he adds, ‘it was the influence of some celestial being, favourable to Troy, that prompted thee;’ thus preventing by anticipation the sting that his words might carry:

 
ἦλθες ἔπειτα σὺ κεῖσε· κελευσέμεναι δέ σ’ ἔμελλεν
δαίμων, ὃς Τρώεσσιν ἐβούλετο κῦδος ὀρέξαι¹⁰³³.
 

Her marriage to Deiphobus.

Tradition has assigned Deiphobus to Helen, as a husband after the death of Paris. This tradition is supported, though not expressly, yet sufficiently, by the Odyssey; for, says Menelaus, when the Greeks had constructed the Horse, and when Helen was brought down to detect those who were within it, by imitating the voices of their wives respectively, it is added,

καί τοι Δηΐφοβος θεοείκελος ἕσπετ’ ἰούσῃ¹⁰³⁴.

And by the further passage in Od. vii. 517, which represents Ulysses as repairing straight from the Horse to the house of Deiphobus, in company with Menelaus.

Presuming therefore that this tale was well founded, it may be remarked, that the selection of Deiphobus, as the person who should take Helen to wife, was probably founded on his superior merit¹⁰³⁵. It was under his image, that Minerva came upon the field to inveigle Hector into facing Achilles: and Hector then described him as the one whom he loved by far the best amidst his full brothers, the children of Priam and of Hecuba. This therefore thoroughly accords with the idea, that Helen was held in respect. Nor let it be thought strange, that she was not permitted to remain single. The idea of single life for women, outside their fathers’ home, seems to have been wholly unknown among the Greeks of Homer. When marriageable, they married; when their country was overcome, they became, as of course, the appendages of the couch of the captor. Penelope herself never dreamt of urging that, when once the return of Ulysses was out of the question, she could have any other option than to make choice among the Suitors whose wife she would become. Telemachus contemplates her immediate restoration to her father’s home when he, her son, should assume the full prerogatives of manhood.

The whole Homeric evidence, then, appears to show that, from the moment of her removal, neither the usages of society, nor the ideas of religion or the moral code, could allow Helen to remain in the single state. But it may be said this seems to prove too much on her behalf; namely, that both the abduction and the subsequent life were against her will. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the testimony of the poems, to suppose that her whole offence lay in having permitted at the first, perhaps half unconsciously, the attentions of a flatterer, who became at once a paramour and a tyrant to his victim. In order to comprehend the heroic age, it is indispensable that we should recollect that the responsibilities of women were contracted in proportion to her strength; and that the heroism of endurance, in which she has since excelled, is a Christian product.

That element of weakness and lightness in a character otherwise beautiful, which the incident of the Horse betrays, was probably at once the source and the measure of her offending in reference to the cause of war. It was a mind of relaxed fibre, and vacillated under pressure. Less than this we cannot suppose, and there is no occasion to suppose more. The respect felt, within certain limits, for women in the heroic age, and so powerfully proved by the Odyssey, may perhaps be adverse to the supposition that Paris carried her away without some degree of previous encouragement. I confine myself to ‘perhaps,’ because it is nowhere indicated in the poems, and we can at most have only a presumption to this effect. On the other hand, it seems certain that what she expiated in life-long sadness was, at any rate, no more than the first step in the ways of folly, the thoughtless error of short-sighted vanity, which the state of manners did not permit her subsequently to redeem. Repent she might: but to return was beyond her power.

On the whole, it may be said with confidence that the Helen of the Homeric poems has been conceived, by an author himself of peculiar delicacy, with great truth of nature, and with no intention to deprive her of a share in the sympathies of his hearers; that he has made her a woman, not cast in the mould of martyrs, nor elevated in moral ideas to a capacity of comprehension and of endurance above her age, but yet endowed with much tenderness of feeling, with the highest grace and refinement, and with a deep and peculiar sense of shame for having done wrong. Probably her appreciation of virtue and of honour, though beneath that of the highest matronly characters, may have been in no way inferior to that of society at large in her own time, and superior to the standard of many following epochs; nay superior also to that which has prevailed, at least locally, even at some periods of the Christian era: as, for example, when Ariosto wrote the remarkable passage —

 
Perche si de’ punir donna o biasmare
Che con uno, o più d’ uno, abbia commesso
Quel, che l’ uom fa con quante n’ ha appetito
E lodato ne va, non che impunito¹⁰³⁶?
 

General estimate of the Homeric Helen.

The degradation of Helen by the later tradition will be treated of hereafter. Meantime it will be seen how much on this subject I have the misfortune to differ from Mure, who has been usually so great a benefactor to the students of Homer. With him ‘Helen is the female counterpart of Paris¹⁰³⁷.’ Paris and Helen are respectively ‘the man of fashion and the woman of pleasure of the heroic age.’ ‘Both are unprincipled votaries of sensual enjoyment; both self-willed and petulant, but not devoid of amiable and generous feeling.’ He finds indeed in her a ‘tenderness of heart and kindly disposition;’ and says that ‘traces of better principle seem also to lurk under the general levity of her habits.’ This petulance, this general levity, I do not find; but rather the notes of a fatal fall, continually and deeply felt under the general grace and beauty of her character. What Mure calls her ‘petulant argument with her patron goddess,’ we take to be the noble and indignant reaction of a soul under the yoke of conscious slavery, and still quick to the throb of virtue. Indeed I derive some comfort from the closing words of his criticism, in which, after expressing his pity and condemnation, he says that still ‘we are constrained to love and admire.’ In the whole circle of the classical literature, as far as it is known to us, there is, I repeat, nothing that approaches so nearly to what Christian theology would term a sense of sin, as the humble demeanour, and the self-denouncing, self-stabbing language of the Argeian Helen.

The character of Paris.

III. The character of Paris is as worthy, as any other in the poems, of the powerful hand and just judgment of Homer. It is neither on the one hand slightly, nor on the other too elaborately, drawn; the touches are just such and so many, as his poetic purpose seemed on the one hand to demand, and on the other to admit. Paris is not indeed the gentleman, but he is the fine gentleman, and the pattern voluptuary, of the heroic ages; and all his successors in these capacities may well be wished joy of their illustrious prototype. The redeeming, or at least relieving point in his character, is one which would condemn any personage of higher intellectual or moral pretensions; it is a total want of earnestness, the unbroken sway of levity and of indifference to all serious and manly considerations. He completely fulfils the idea of the poco-curante, except as to the display of his personal beauty, the enjoyment of luxury, and the resort to sensuality as the best refuge from pain and care. He is not a monster, for he is neither savage nor revengeful; but still further is he from being one of Homer’s heroes, for he has neither honour, courage, eloquence, thought, nor prudence. That he bears the reproaches of Hector without irritation, is due to that same moral apathy, and that narrowness of intelligence, which makes him insensible to those of his wife. No man can seriously resent what he does not really feel. He is wholly destitute even of the delicacy and refinement which soften many of the features of vice; and the sensuality he shows in the Third Book¹⁰³⁸ partakes largely of the brutal character which marks the lusts of Jupiter. No wise, no generous word, ever passes from his lips. On one subject only he is determined enough; it is, that he will not give up the woman whom he well knows to be without attachment to him¹⁰³⁹, and whom he keeps not as the object of his affections, but merely as the instrument of his pleasures. One solicitude only he cherishes; it is to decorate his person, to exhibit his beauty, to brighten with care the arms that he would fain parade, but has not the courage to employ against the warriors of Greece.

There are other greater achievements in the Iliad, but none finer, or more deserving our commendation, than the manner in which Homer has handled the difficult character of Paris. It was quite necessary to raise him to a certain point of importance; had he been simply contemptible, his place in the early stages of the Trojan tale, and the prolongation of the War on his account, would have involved a too violent departure from the laws of poetical credibility. This importance Homer, whether from imagination or from history, has supplied; in part by his very high position. Even if I were wrong in the opinion that the Poet meant to represent him as the eldest son, or the eldest living son, of Priam, it would still at least be plain that he is more eminent and conspicuous than any other member of the royal house after Hector; while he is so much less worthy than Deiphobus, for example, that no one, I think, could doubt that his distinction is due to his being senior to that respectable prince and warrior, and to the rest of his brothers. Further, the Poet has raised him to the very highest elevation in two particulars; one the gift of archery, the other the endowment of corporeal grace and beauty. But neither of these involves one particle of courage, or of any other virtue; for the archer of Homer’s time was not like the British bowman, who stood with his comrades in the line, and discharged the function in war which has since fallen to musketry; he was a mere sharpshooter, always having the most deliberate opportunity of aim at the enemy, and always himself out of danger. No archer is ever hit in the Iliad; but Pandarus, so skilled in the bow, is slain, and Paris is disgraced, when they respectively venture to assume the spear. Again, the Poet has contrived that the accomplishments of Paris, though in themselves unsurpassed, shall attract towards him no share, great or small, of our regard. This prince really does more, than even Hector does, to stay the torrent of the Grecian war; for in the Eleventh Book, from behind a pillar, he wounds Diomed, who had fought with the Immortals, Eurypylus, who had also been one of the nine accepters of Hector’s challenge, and Machaon, one of the two surgeons. Thus Homer¹⁰⁴⁰ has been able to make him most useful in battle, most lovely to the eye, and yet alike detestable and detested.

This aim he attains, not by that tame method of description which he so much eschews, but by the turn he gives to narrative, and by the colour he imparts to it in one or a few words.

Paris, though effeminate and apathetic, is not gentle, either to his wife or his enemies; and, when he has wounded Diomed, he wishes the shot had been a fatal one. The reply of Diomed cuts deeper than any arrow when he addresses him as,

Bowman! ribald! well-frizzled girl-hunter¹⁰⁴¹!

Again, the Poet tells us, as if by accident, that when, after the battle with Menelaus, he could not be found, it was not because the Trojans were unwilling to give him up, for they hated him with the hatred, which they felt to dark Death¹⁰⁴². And again we learn, how he uses bribery to keep his ground in the Assembly; how he refuses to recognise even his own military inferiority, but lamely accounts for the success of Menelaus by saying that all men have their turn¹⁰⁴³; and how he causes shame to his own countrymen and exultation to the Greeks, when they contrast the pretensions of his splendid appearance with his miserable performances in the field¹⁰⁴⁴.

Homer, full as he is of the harmonies of nature, differs in this as in so many points from most among later writers, that he does not set at nought the due proportion between the moral and the intellectual man, nor combine high gifts of mind with a mean and bad heart. He never varies from this rule; and he has been careful to pay it a marked observance in the case of Paris. No set of speeches in the Iliad are marked by greater poverty of ideas. If he cleans his arms and builds his house, which are honourable employments, they are employments immediately connected with the ostentation to which he was so much given. More than this, the Poet informs us, through the medium of Helen, that he was but ill supplied with sense, and that he was too old to mend:

τούτῳ δ’ οὔτ’ ἂρ νῦν φρένες ἔμπεδοι, οὔτ ἄρ’ ὀπίσσω

ἔσσονται¹⁰⁴⁵.

The immediate transition, in the Third Book, from the field of battle, where he was disgraced, to the bed of luxury, is admirably suited to impress upon the mind, by the strong contrast, the real character of Paris. Nor let it be thought, that Homer has gratuitously forced upon us the scene between him and his reluctant wife. It was just that he should mark as a bad man him who had sinned grossly, selfishly, and fatally, alike against Greece and his own family and country. This impression would not have been consistent and thorough in all its parts, if we had been even allowed to suppose that, as a refined, affectionate, and tender husband, he made such amends to Helen as the case permitted for the wrong done her in his hot and heady youth. Such a supposition might excusably have been entertained, and it would have been supported by the very feebleness of the character of Paris and by his part in the war, had Homer been silent upon the subject. He, therefore, though with cautious hand, lifts the veil so far as to show us that in our variously compounded nature animal desire can use up and absorb the strength which ought to nerve our higher faculties, and that, as none are more cruel than the timid, so none are more brutal than the effeminate.

One hold, and one only, Paris seems to retain on human affection in any sort or form. The paternal instinct of Priam makes him shudder and retire, when he is told that Paris is about to meet Menelaus in single combat. This trait would have been of extraordinary and universal beauty, had the object of the affection been even moderately worthy: it is a remarkable proof of the debasement of Paris, and of the strong sense which Homer gives us of that debasement, that the tender father seems in a measure tainted by the very warmth and strength of his love.

SECT. VII.
The declension of the great Homeric Characters in the later Tradition ¹⁰⁴⁶

Physical conditions of the Greek Theatre.

One legitimate mode of measuring the true greatness of Homer is, by observing what has become of the materials and instruments he worked with, upon their passing into other hands. Acting on this principle, let us now pass on to consider the murderous maltreatment, which the most remarkable of all the Homeric characters have had to endure in the later tradition; partly, as I have already observed, from general, and partly from special causes. On the more general influence of this kind I have already touched. Among the special causes, we should place the declension in the fundamental ideas of morals and of politics between the time of Homer and the historic age. With this we may reckon one which, though it may appear to be technical, must, in all likelihood, have been most important, namely, the physical necessities imposed by the fixed conditions of dramatic representation among the Greeks¹⁰⁴⁷. Their theatres were constructed on a scale, which may be called colossal as compared with ours. Both polity and religion entered into the institution of the stage. The intense nationality of their life required a similar character in their plays, and likewise in the places where they were to be represented. Not therefore a particular company of auditors, but rather the whole public of the city, where the representation took place, was to be accommodated. In consequence, the dimensions of the buildings exceeded the usual powers of the human eye and ear; so that the figure was heightened by buskins, the countenance thrown into bolder and coarser outline by masks, and the voice endowed with a great increase of power by acoustic contrivances within the masks, as well as aided by the construction of the buildings. All this was the more strictly requisite, because the plays were acted in the open air.

Now this general exaggeration of feature beyond the standard of nature had an irresistible tendency to affect the mode in which characters were modelled for representation; to cause them to be laid out morally as well as physically in strong outline, in masses large and comparatively coarse. The fine and careful finishing of Homer required that those, who were to recite him, should retain an entire and unfettered command over the measure in which the bodily organs were to be employed. The τύνη δ’ ὠμοΐιν of Achilles to Patroclus might bear to be spoken in a voice of thunder, and would absolutely require the bard to use considerable exertion of the lungs; but the scenes of Helen with Priam in the Third Book, of Hector with Andromache in the Sixth, of Priam with Achilles in the Twenty-fourth, would admit of no such treatment; and as these passages could not themselves be rendered, so neither could anything bearing a true analogy to Homer be given, unless the actor had enjoyed full liberty to contract as well as expand his own volume of sound, or unless he had enjoyed both easy access, on any terms he pleased, to the ears of his audience, and the full benefit of that most important assistance, which the eye renders to the ear by observing the play of countenance that accompanies delivery. King Lear, King John, or Othello, could not have been represented more truly and adequately in a Greek theatre, than the Achilles, or than the Helen, of Homer. Those who have ever happened to discuss with a deaf person a critical subject, requiring circumspect and tender handling, will know how much the necessity for constant tension of the voice restrains freedom in the expression of thought, and mars its perfectness. The Greek actors lay under a somewhat similar necessity, and to their necessities of course the diction of the tragedians was, whether consciously or unconsciously, adapted.

Let it, however, be borne in mind, that when we criticize the conceptions of the Homeric characters by the later Greek writers, it need not be with the supposition that we have eyes to discern in Homer what they did not see. Their reproductions must be taken to represent not so much the free dictates of the mind and judgment of the later poets, as the conditions of representation to which they were compelled to conform, and the popular sentiments and opinions which, in the character of popular writers, they could not but take for their standard. The invention of printing has given a liberty and independence to thought, at least in conjunction with poetry and the drama, such as it could not possess while the poet, in Athens for example, could sing in no other way but one, namely, to the nation collected in a mass. The poet of modern times may write for a minority of the public, nay, for a mere handful of admirers, which is destined, yet only in after-years, to grow like the mustard-seed of the parable. But the Athenian dramatist was compelled to be the poet of the majority at the moment, and to be carried on the stream of its sympathies, however adverse its direction might be to that in which, if at liberty to choose, he would himself have moved.

Obliteration of the finer distinctions.

Accordingly, when we come to survey the literary history of those great characters which the Poet gave as a perpetual possession to the world, we find, naturally enough, that the flood of the more recent traditions has long ago come in upon the Homeric narrative, like the inundation brought by Neptune and Apollo over the wall and trench of the Greeks. Like every other deluge, in sweeping away the softer materials, which give the more refined lines to the picture, it leaves the comparatively hard and sharp ones harder and sharper than ever. Thus it is with the Homeric characters, transplanted into the later tradition. The broader distinctions of his personages one from another have been not only retained, but exaggerated: all the finer ones have disappeared. No one, deriving his ideas from Homer only, could confound Diomed with Ajax, or either with Agamemnon, or any of the three with Menelaus, or any of the four with Achilles; but when we come down to the age of the tragedians, what remains to mark them, except only for Agamemnon his office, and for Achilles his superiority in physical strength? In the Homeric poems, the strong and towering intellectual qualities even outweigh the great physical and animal forces of his chief hero: by the usual predominance in man of what is gross over what is fine, the principal and higher parts of his character are afterwards suppressed, and it becomes comparatively vulgarized. In the Ulysses of Homer, again, the intellectual element predominates in such a manner, that not even the most superficial reader can fail to perceive it. He and Helen stand out in the Iliad from among others with whom they might have been confounded; the first by virtue of his self-mastery and sagacity, the second, not only by her beauty and her fall, but by the singularly tender and ethereal shading of her character. The later tradition, laying rude hands upon the subtler distinctions thus established, has degraded these two great characters, the one into little better than a stage rogue, the other into little more than a stage voluptuary, who adds to the guilt of that character the further and coarse enormities of faithlessness, and even of bloodthirstiness.

Even so soon as in the time of the Cyclical writers the character of Helen had begun to be altered. In Homer she is the victim of Paris, carried off from her home and country, and only then yielding to his lust. In the Κύπρια ἔπη, as we have that poem reported by Proclus, she begins by receiving his gifts, that is to say, his bribes; she is an adulteress under her husband’s roof; and she joins in plundering him, in order to escape with her paramour.

It is in Euripides that we find the largest and most diversified reproduction of the old Homeric characters, and to him, therefore, among the three tragedians, we should give our chief attention. When we consider them as a whole, according to his representation of them, we find that their entire primitive and patriarchal colouring has gone. The manners are not those of any age in particular; least of all are they the manners of a very early age. And, as the entire company has lost its distinctive type, so have the members of it when taken singly. In the Troades, for example, Menelaus is simply the injured and exasperated husband; Helen is the faithless wife; and she is kept up to a certain standard of dramatic importance in the eye of the world only by another departure from the Homeric picture, for she is armed with an enormous power of argument and sophistry. By a similar appendage of ingenious disquisition, the essentially plain and matronly qualities of Hecuba have been overlaid and hidden. Achilles, in the Iphigenia, is a gallant and a generous warrior; but we have neither the grandeur of his tempestuous emotions as in Homer, nor, on the other hand, any of that peculiar refinement with which they are in so admirable a manner both blended and set in contrast. Agamemnon has lost, in Euripides, his vacillation and misgivings, and is the average and, so to speak, rounded king and warrior, instead of the mixed and particoloured, but in no sense common-place, character that Homer has made him. Though Andromache is a passionately fond mother, she has nothing whatever that identifies her as the original Andromache. Indeed, of the Homeric women, it may be said that in Euripides they have ceased to be womanly; they have in general nothing of that adjective character (if the phrase may be allowed), that ever leaning and clinging attitude, to which support from without is a moral necessity, and which so profoundly marks them all in Homer. Again, Iphigenia, Cassandra, Polyxena, who are either scarcely or not at all Homeric, have now become grand heroines, with unbounded stage-effect; but there is no stage-effect at all in Homer’s Helen, or in his Andromache. Andromache, for example, is not elaborately drawn. She is rather a product of Homer’s character and feeling, than of his art. She is simply what Tennyson in his ‘Isabel’ calls ‘the stately flower of perfect wifehood.’ In her simplicity, the true idea of her might easily have been preserved by the later literature, had the conception of woman as such remained morally the same. But the Andromache of Homer was doomed to deteriorate, on account of her purity, as his Achilles, his Ulysses, his Helen degenerated, because the flights of such high genius could not be sustained, and weaker wings drooped down to a lower level. As Hecuba was the aged matron of the Iliad, and Helen its mixed type of woman, so Andromache was the young mother and the wife. Her one only thought lay in her husband and her child; but in the Troades, wordy and diffuse, she discusses, in a most business-like manner, the question whether she shall or shall not transfer her affections to the new lord, whose property she has become. She ends, indeed, by deciding the question rightly; but it is one that the Homeric Andromache never could have entertained.